Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations 3030379795, 9783030379797

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Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations Alla Zareva

Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations

Alla Zareva

Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations

Alla Zareva Department of English Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-37979-7    ISBN 978-3-030-37980-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37980-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Dimitar and Ivo

Preface

In the last couple of decades, research on the language used in higher education has greatly contributed to our understanding of its subtleties. Generally, however, the attention given to academic speech, particularly student-produced oral academic discourse, has been lagging behind the interest in written academic prose. So, one of the main goals of this book is to expand the scope of academic language research to include an oral academic text variety—i.e. student academic presentations—that has not been sufficiently addressed in the research literature. The more narrow focus is on the lexical aspect of presentations with an emphasis on lexical accommodation strategies that effective student presenters employ to accommodate their listeners. The central idea around which the analyses are carried out is that, if we assume that an audience-oriented approach to presentation planning and delivery is central to the effectiveness of any presentation, then, we should also take a close look at the language that is used in real-life successful student presentations to see how this is accomplished. The main purpose of this book, as mentioned earlier, is to bring to the fore some under-researched lexical features of student academic presentations and connect their analysis to presenters’ attempts for audience accommodation. It was largely motivated by the audience-centric approach to presentation design and delivery, promoted by numerous books and manuals on developing effective academic presentations. They, however, do not treat the language of presentations in much depth, nor do they provide language recommendations that are based on representative data sources. So, the analyses presented in this book attempt to remedy this vii

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state of affairs by taking a closer look at the lexical choices student presenters make in real-life successful academic presentations, based on a corpus of student academic presentations (SAP corpus). The SAP corpus allowed the investigation to be carried out from a register point of view—a perspective which was chosen because it combines the analysis of typical linguistic features with the analysis of the communicative purposes and situational context of use surrounding the production of texts. The interpretation of the findings is through the lens of Communication Accommodation Theory which, in my view, is one of the most comprehensive theories about why people begin to adjust aspects of their verbal and non-verbal behavior to their interlocutors upon entering a communicative interaction and how they accomplish it. Given that academic presentations are a planned, prepared, and (most of the time) rehearsed discourse, it is logical to assume that many language choices presenters make are motivated by their conscious awareness of the necessity to adjust their language to the needs and expectations of their audience. Such adjustments can be driven by various motives, but the research presented in this book primarily adds to the body of work exploring the cognitive functions of speech adjustments at a lexical level. To my knowledge, the lexical features (at a single word and collocational level) under investigation in this book have not been studied in the context of this particular type of oral academic discourse neither have they received much attention from speech accommodation perspective in that context. It should be mentioned here that the language of the presentations is English and the presenters are novice graduate students who are native speakers of American English. Thus, the findings are language specific and their interpretation is limited to Anglophone academic culture. However, it can reasonably be argued that their implications go beyond the specific situational characteristics of the SAP corpus and can be used comparatively across other languages and cultures. They also point to some practically useful lexical trends that can be incorporated in class discussions and materials, specifically designed to develop students’ presentation skills. As an added bonus, they offer data-based evidence of the lexical composition of successful student presentations to a wide readership of researchers, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, teacher trainers, prospective and practicing teachers, and generally anyone wishing to keep up with this line of investigation. Norfolk, VA

Alla Zareva

Acknowledgments

The inspiration to write this book comes from all graduate students who have asked the questions I attempt to answer here. They have given me the reason, motivation, and stimulation to compile the SAP corpus and analyze various aspects of it over the years. They are the people from whom I have learned the most and who have been a continuing source of insight into the minds of audiences and presentation neophytes. I appreciate all that they have taught me. Also, a special thank you goes to all students who allowed me to include their presentations in the SAP corpus and use their work in my examples. Others have tremendously helped with transcribing and double-checking the transcriptions of the presentations, and I truly appreciate their time, patience, and attention to detail. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kaitlin Mikatarian who cross-checked the SAP corpus collocations with COCA, read the whole thing, scrubbed out much of the wordiness, and never complained; your comments were always helpful and your help was invaluable. Finally, a special thanks to my family for their love and support—they took me out to eat every time dinner was not ready, did the household chores because “Mom has a deadline,” cheered me up when I was low on energy, and insisted that this book be written. Without them, it would not have been.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Why Looking into Student Academic Presentations?  1 The Value of Student Academic Presentations in Higher Education   3 Keeping the Audience in Mind: Communication Accommodation Theory and the Notion of Speech Adjustment   6 Register Perspective on the Analysis of Student Academic Presentations: Description of the SAP Corpus   9 Register Perspective on the Analysis of Student Academic Presentations   9 Description of the SAP Corpus and its Situational Characteristics  11 Overview of the Book  17 References  18 2 Survey of Books and Guides on Academic Presentations 21 Survey of Books and Guides on Academic Presentations  23 Findings from the Survey  25 General Principles of Academic Presentation Development  25 Effectiveness of Academic Presentations  29 Language Recommendations for Speech Adjustments  33 Language Data Foundation of the Surveyed Sources  37 Concluding Remarks  38 References  39 xi

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3 Lexical Profiles of Student Academic Presentations 41 Lexical Profiling of Texts  43 Lexical Layers in Texts  43 Determining the Lexical Complexity of Texts  45 Research on the Lexical Profiles of Student Academic Presentations  48 Lexical Profile Measures Used in the Analysis of the SAP Corpus  50 Lexical Profiles of the Presentations in the SAP Corpus  53 Core Vocabulary  54 Lexical Complexity  55 Oral Discourse Items and Disfluencies  58 Lexical Convergence in Student Academic Presentations  59 Concluding Remarks  64 References  65 4 Collocations in Student Academic Presentations 69 The Notion of Collocation: Various Perspectives, Various Research Agendas  71 Functions of Formulaic Language and Collocations in Native Speakers’ Language Use  74 Collocations in Student Academic Presentations  79 Identification of the Word Combinations  80 Results and Discussion of the Findings  83 Concluding Remarks  90 References  90 5 Summary of Findings and Take-Aways 95 Final Thoughts 103 References 104 Author Index105 Subject Index109

List of Tables

Table 3.1

Summary of research on the lexical profiles of NESs’ academic presentations49 Table 3.2 Lexical profiles of the SAP corpus texts (n = 50)54 Table 4.1 Correlations of the collocation frequencies (normalized to 100,000 words) between the SAP corpus and COCA 85 Table 4.2 Correlations of the extracted SAP corpus collocations across COCA’s registers (normalized frequencies to 100,000 words) 88

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Why Looking into Student Academic Presentations?

Abstract  The academic presentation is one of the fairly under-researched spoken academic varieties, especially with regard to certain linguistic features that reveal presenters’ attempts to accommodate their listeners. The chapter offers a brief summary of some of the benefits of academic presentations for degree-seeking college students. It also discusses a connection between the strong audience orientation, promoted by many published manuals and materials on giving effective presentations, and the notion of audience accommodation as proposed by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT). The discussion is followed by a brief overview of the register perspective taken in the analysis of the corpus of student academic presentations (SAP) used in the book and an overview of the rest of the chapters. Keywords  Oral academic discourse • Student presentation • Register • Speech adjustment • Communication Accommodation Theory • Specialized corpus “If people are going to listen to me for half an hour, they should like what they hear. If they like what they hear, they’ll carry away something from this presentation, right?” This is what a friend of mine said to me when I complemented her on an interesting choice of a presentation topic as we were gathering in class for our end-of-the semester graduate student © The Author(s) 2020 A. Zareva, Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37980-3_1

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­ resentations. Years later, the straightforward logic of what she had said p made me realize that, in fact, it captures the very essence of the relationship between the purpose of an academic presentation and how we flesh it out with all the necessary ingredients to make it work for our listeners. From my perspective as a linguist, the most important ingredient of all is the language choices we make to achieve that purpose. The keywords here are language choices (rather than the language we use) to emphasize the importance of thinking consciously about the language of academic presentations so that the audience feels understood, included, and valued in the discourse. The purpose of this book is to bring to the fore some under-researched linguistic features of academic presentations—more specifically, student academic presentations—by connecting their analysis to presenters’ attempts for listener accommodation. The features are lexical in nature (at a single word and collocational level) and, to my knowledge, have not been studied in the context of this particular type of oral academic discourse neither have they received much attention from speech accommodation perspective in that context. If we assume that an audience-centric approach to presentation design and delivery is central to the effectiveness of presentations—a claim that books and manuals on developing effective presentations strongly emphasize—then, we should also take a close look at the language that is used in real-life student presentations to see how this is accomplished. The analyses presented in this book are a step in this direction. Moreover, the survey of a number of published books and guides on academic presentations (see Chap. 2) revealed that the majority of the sources do not treat the language of presentations in any depth neither do they provide language-related recommendations or examples that are based on representative data sources. So, the findings from the analyses of the corpus of student academic presentations (SAP corpus) discussed in this book can be a stepping stone for more specific language recommendations that instructors and material designers can use to base their feedback and advice on, especially when addressing speech adjustments for audience accommodation purposes in students’ presentations. It should be mentioned here that the language of the presentations included in the SAP corpus is English and the presenters are novice graduate-­level college students who are native speakers of English (a detailed description of the SAP corpus is presented later in this chapter). Thus, the findings are language specific (in this case, English-specific) and their interpretation is limited to Anglophone academic culture. Nonetheless, I would argue that their implications go beyond the specific context of the SAP corpus. For instance, they can be

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used for comparative purposes across other languages and academic cultures; they point to some practically useful lexical trends in student presentations that can be incorporated in class discussions and materials designed to develop students’ presentation skills, and they offer data-based evidence of the lexical composition of student presentations to a wide readership of researchers, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, teacher trainers, prospective and practicing teachers, and generally anyone wishing to keep up with this line of investigation. This chapter begins with a discussion about the value of student academic presentations in higher education and offers a brief summary of the main benefits of the genre for degree-seeking college students. The benefits are discussed from a learning, professional, communication, and disciplinary point of view. I then make a connection between strong audience orientation, which many published manuals on giving successful presentations underscore, and the notion of audience accommodation as proposed by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT)—a theory that offers one of the most comprehensive frameworks for the analysis of verbal behavior in terms of language adjustments speakers make to best accommodate their listeners in the discourse. This is followed by a brief description of the register perspective taken in the analysis of the SAP corpus and a description of its composition and situational characteristics. The last section gives an overview of the chapters included in the book.

The Value of Student Academic Presentations in Higher Education Higher education culture, particularly in North America, is dominated by written assignments (Zareva 2012). However, there is growing realization among students, instructors, and employers alike that development of skills for giving effective presentations should begin early in students’ college education  as those skills are essential to the training of future professionals (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Zareva 2009a, 2012, 2019a). Also, in the last couple of decades, there has been an increasing trend in presentations being used by employers for recruitment purposes, which confirms the value associated with the skill of displaying one’s professional and discipline-specific competence in an effective, appropriate, and acceptable way. This is probably one of the main reasons why, in recent years, many undergraduate programs in North America have started

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to include required coursework in academic communication that puts a special emphasis on honing students’ presentation skills. This long overdue emphasis on developing students’ presentational competence reveals not only an accent on this oral academic variety as an integral part of college students’ professionalization, but also well-deserved attention to the role it plays in various disciplinary and specialized contexts in which students participate long after they leave college. In essence, as Engleberg and Daly (2005) pointed out, the principles behind developing and delivering messages in one’s own life and the larger world apply to all communication contexts; hence, “learning the basic skills of presentation speaking provides a lifelong guide for becoming a more effective and ethical communicator” (p. xxi). In addition to having disciplinary and professional value, academic presentations are increasingly used to encourage students to take charge of their own learning (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007). In reality, putting a presentation together is probably as effortful and demanding as writing a paper on the same topic, and it requires the mastery of a number of academic skills which are shared between academic speech and writing (Zareva 2009a). For example, it involves some skills actively used in academic writing such as analytical and critical thinking, organizational skills to arrange the logical flow of dense informational content, argument development skills, summary of main points, etc. which have to be put to use along with the mastery of a set of presentation design and delivery skills that come with challenges of their own. It appears, then, that requiring students to give academic presentations in content areas would not only enhance their learning of that content, but would also bring extra value to their learning experience. Not to forget that a presentation can also serve as another form of new knowledge dissemination and, in that, be an effective way of prompting peer learning of that knowledge. Along the same lines, presentation assignments also have a great potential to increase students’ ability to evaluate research (Davis et al. 2012). From information packaging point of view, much effort and objective criticism are required from students to evaluate the validity and currency of the ideas derived from the sources on which their presentations are based. Similarly, as many books and guides on developing effective presentation skills have pointed out (see Chap. 2 for a more detailed discussion), the student-as-presentation-designer perspective informs the student-as-­ listener perspective about critically evaluating the presentations of others in terms of new ideas, validity of arguments, strength of methodologies,

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data interpretations, new perspectives taken on issues, etc. That, in turn, goes back to inform the student-as-presentation-designer perspective and encourages students to discover the strengths and weaknesses (or even flaws) of their own research and presentation designs and to potentially improve them in this inherently cyclic process. Lastly, it is important to point out the value of student presentations in light of the relationship of the genre to other oral and written academic genres that college students are exposed to and expected to master during their studies. Swales (2004) defined the network of academic genres as “the totality of genres available for a particular sector” (p.  22) and the presentation holds a special place in this network. For instance, students may discuss a certain topic in class as part of the content of a course; they may later on carry out library research on a related topic for a course assignment and then give a presentation on their findings to the rest of the class; that may lead to a research proposal for a study, which may later on turn into a thesis or dissertation, etc. There are many other possible network scenarios, but the important point here is that, regardless of whether the presentation occurs closer to the beginning or the end of the network of genres, it holds a great potential as a disciplinary learning tool and, at the same time, builds the foundation for other genres in the network. Thus, recognizing its potential, strengths, and benefits is a good starting point for incorporating it more consistently into the networks of genres we encourage our students to engage with and, respectively, for enlightening them on how to be in control of the language they use in their presentations for maximum effect. In sum, assigning students to give academic presentations, especially when they reach a certain level of disciplinary expertise, comes with many benefits. Certainly, not all of them were mentioned above, but the ones discussed earlier emphasize the bridging role presentations play across various academic genres, educational and professional experiences, informational packaging  skills, and knowledge dissemination  opportunities. Not only do they strengthen the student-as-presentation-designer awareness of what it takes to put an effective presentation together, but they also feed this awareness into the presenter-as-listener awareness of how to critically evaluate the presentations of others and beyond. If one of the benefits of college education is that it prompts students to align their personal communication skills with the communication conventions of their ­disciplines, then, while still in college, students should be given ample opportunities to experience

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and master the presentation conventions of their own discipline since the benefits of that experience will extend far beyond their college education.

Keeping the Audience in Mind: Communication Accommodation Theory and the Notion of Speech Adjustment One characteristic of effective academic presentations that many published books and manuals on giving successful presentations across the disciplines consistently recommend is a strong audience orientation as a guiding principle of presentation design and delivery (see Chap. 2). As Levin and Topping (2006) put it succinctly, “a successful presentation is not only given to the audience, it is given for the audience” (p. 4). That, of course, entails audience accommodation at multiple levels—e.g., at the level of topic and content selection, information organization, structure of the presentation, visual support design, delivery style, etc. Arguably, one of the most important aspects of audience accommodation is the choice of specific language to get the message across as clearly as possible by leading the audience “from word to image, image to idea, idea to concept” (McCarthy and Hatcher 2002, p. 70). The notion of audience accommodation can be, perhaps, most meaningfully explored through the lens of Howard Giles’ Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) (see Giles 2016a, b and McGlone and Giles 2011 for a history of the developments of the theory over the past forty years). Rooted in conversation analysis, sociolinguistic and communication theories, one constant interest that CAT has explored throughout all its phases of development is the interest in language accommodation as an integral component of changing and adapting communication behavior in different contexts. At the heart of CAT is the understanding that people begin to adjust aspects of their verbal behavior (e.g., code [choice of language/dialect], speech rate, accent, pitch, word choices, etc.) and non-­ verbal choices (e.g., gestures, gaze, posture, etc.) to their interlocutors upon entering a communicative interaction (Dragojevic et  al. 2016; Gasiorek 2016). Many of these adjustments are unconscious or occur at a low level of awareness, though some may be conscious and deliberate. Keeping in mind that academic presentations are a planned, prepared, and (most of the times) rehearsed discourse, it would be logical to assume that many language choices presenters make are motivated by their conscious

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awareness of the necessity to adjust their language to the needs and expectations of their audience. Such adjustments, as CAT posits, are primarily driven by two main motives—affective (related to social distance management and identity maintenance) and cognitive (related to the management of comprehension and communication effectiveness) (Dragojevic et  al. 2016; Giles et al. 1979; Street and Giles 1982). To date, research based on CAT has focused mostly on the affective motives behind accommodation, and much less work has been done on the cognitive functions of accommodation, especially on adjustments that can help increase communication efficiency (Gasiorek 2016). The research presented in this book (see Chaps. 3 and 4) will add to the body of work exploring the cognitive functions of speech adjustments at a lexical level that facilitate listeners’ comprehension and, overall, result in increasing the effectiveness of the communicative event. One of the general principles of academic presentation design is to target a presentation to an audience with specific characteristics; hence, preliminary audience analysis is by necessity a part of the process itself. Motivated by elevating listeners’ cognitive pressure during their online processing of complex informational content, effective presenters assess the characteristics, needs, and expectations of their audience in advance and, consequently, adjust their speech to be more predictable, intelligible, and comprehensible to their listeners (Engleberg and Daly 2005; Levin and Topping 2006). CAT further postulates that there are three main ways in which people can adjust their verbal behaviors to one another: convergence, divergence, and maintenance. Convergence refers to adjustments in the direction of becoming more similar to others. Research on convergence in verbal behavior has shown that it is a preferred form of accommodation across a variety of language features in many contexts. For example, Riordan et al. (2013) found a tendency toward convergence on the length and duration of individual instant messaging conversations; Crook and Booth (1997) determined that matching readers’ sensory predicates (i.e., content words that capture their primary representational systems) builds rapport and provides common understanding between senders and recipients of e-mail messages; Linnemann and Jucks’ (2016) study revealed lexical convergence in telephone interviews, especially when the interviewers maintained a restricted language style. Divergence, on the other hand, refers to adjusting one’s communicative behavior to be more dissimilar to others. It has been found manifested in situations involving speakers of different languages or language varieties who may

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choose to project the linguistic identity they associate with by deliberately using various features of that language/variety as a divergence strategy (e.g., broadening their accent, introducing dialect-specific vocabulary, etc.). For example, after examining the language use among the Kegite club members, Okeke et al. (2018) found that, to establish group identity, the members developed a specific type of a slang which was intelligible only to other club members but not to non-members. So, by using this slang, they deliberately distanced themselves from the general public and diverged to create social distance between themselves and the bigger community of non-members. Finally, maintenance refers to sustaining one’s “default” way of communication without adjusting for others. An example of maintenance would be an Anglophone speaker continuing to respond in English when asked a question in French in a bilingual communication context (e.g., Bourhis et al. 2007). By and large, the two main mechanisms of communication accommodation, convergence and divergence, can be realized by multiple forms of adjustment (e.g., upward or downward, full or partial, symmetrical or asymmetrical adjustment, etc.), and they can also be manifested at a single dimension  (e.g., code or accent only) or multiple dimensions (e.g., code and accent). Generally, convergence is associated with more favorable outcomes and positive listener evaluation and satisfaction—for instance, it has been shown to increase speakers’ perceived competence and credibility (Aune and Kikuchi 1993), to build rapport and common understanding between interlocutors (Crook and Booth 1997), increase interpersonal likability (Linnemann and Jucks 2016), and improve overall general communicative effectiveness and mutual understanding (Dragojevic et al. 2016). We will also see that this is the primary mechanism of audience accommodation that student presenters employed in their lexical (see Chap. 3) and collocation uses (see Chap. 4). This is probably because, by virtue of being rooted in disciplinary knowledge, scientific/academic presentations require the use of specialist terminology (along with non-­specialized language) to foster shared, stable, and guiding meaning with a specialist group (Rice and Giles 2017). At the same time, for accommodation purposes, such usage has to be reconciled with the pressures of online processing that listeners experience during a presentation (the cognitive motives behind speech accommodation). This, in turn, requires presenters’ conscious awareness (vs. intuitive feel) of the language that would facilitate listener comprehension without compromising their own social status and identity (affective motives behind speech accommodation). The discussion of the lexical features

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under investigation in this book will focus on how successful student presenters adjust certain aspects of their lexical usage in this regard.

Register Perspective on the Analysis of Student Academic Presentations: Description of the SAP Corpus Register Perspective on the Analysis of Student Academic Presentations The analysis of student academic presentations as a specialized text variety can be approached from several different perspectives such as rhetoric, discourse, register, genre, style, etc. These perspectives are intricately intertwined and, oftentimes, difficult to disentangle or interpret independently of each other as their defining characteristics may sometimes overlap. For instance, analyzing academic presentations from a genre perspective will require the use of complete presentations in order to determine the linguistic characteristics that have been used to structure the whole text. However, a register or a style analysis of the same variety can be applied both to complete texts and text samples or excerpts as long as they form a representative sample of data. Generally, in academic context, it is crucially important to analyze text varieties from various perspectives not only because each one sheds new light over the others, but also because most academic text varieties need explicit instruction to be learned. So, the more we learn from the multitude of perspectives taken on the analysis of texts, the more specific we can be in our teaching of various genres/text varieties or developing students’ skills in areas that are novel to them. By and large, academic text varieties in speech or writing (e.g., research papers, grant proposals, dissertation defenses, academic presentations, research progress reports, etc.) rely on the use of different linguistic features, structures, and organizational patterns, which students need to be able to recognize, interpret, and productively use in their own academic discourse. This, in turn, means that one of the main goals of teaching a specific text variety, particularly a specialized one, should be to raise ­students’ awareness of its characteristic features and language patterns not only because they are related to the notion of appropriateness in disciplinary context, but also because they are expected to be encoded in students’

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own production of texts. Needless to say, the task of acquiring register or genre characteristics is much more challenging for non-native speakers than native speakers. Not only are these characteristics language specific, but they are also culture-bound even when there are similarities in educational contexts across different cultures. In my research on proficient non-­ native English speakers (NNESs) seeking academic degrees in the US (e.g., Zareva 2009a, b, 2012, 2019b), I have consistently found that one of their greatest challenges is the lack of previous presentation giving training and experience both in their native language and the language of their degree programs (i.e., English). Thus, their reference point for presentation development is pretty weak, and, in the absence of specific guidelines from their instructors, those students are largely left to their own resources to “figure it out” on their own (usually in a short period of time). So, undoubtedly, there is a need for more language-based research on this academic variety, which will benefit English native speaking and non-native speaking novice presenters alike by providing them with suggestions grounded in real-life successful student presentations rather than prescriptive recommendations based on personal preferences of language use. Realizing the elusiveness of the notions of register and genre in the published literature, it needs to be clarified here how these terms will be used in the present book. As some scholars (e.g., Biber and Conrad 2009; Swales 1990) have rightly pointed out, the two terms have sometimes been used interchangeably to refer to text varieties associated with specific situational characteristics and communicative purposes (see Swales 1990, 2004; Biber and Conrad 2009 for a detailed explanation of the genre and register approach to text analysis). In brief, the distinction between the two terms considered in this book is that registers are described for their typical linguistic characteristics in relation to their functional potentials to serve the situational context in which texts are produced, while the genre perspective of text analysis emphasizes the conventional features of structuring whole texts, which may occur only once in the text (Biber and Conrad 2009). Even though multiple perspectives can be applied to the analysis of student academic presentations, the one taken in this book is from a register point of view as this perspective combines the analysis of typical linguistic features with the analysis of the communicative purposes and situational context of use. Whenever the term genre is used throughout the book, the reference is to a class of communicative events which has

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certain informational, rhetorical, and stylistic features encoded and recognized by the members of the discourse communities that make use of it. To study a register, Biber and Conrad (2009) proposed three main aspects to be included in its analysis—i.e. (1) a description of the situational context and communicative purposes, (2) a description of the typical linguistic features, and (3) functional analysis of the relationship between the linguistic features and the situational context. The scholars have also provided a detailed framework of situational characteristics that can be used for the description of any genre or register. The framework includes seven main characteristics which will be applied here to the description of the situational context of the presentations in the SAP corpus. Some of these characteristics would most probably be shared to a various extent across different academic cultures, educational institutions, disciplines, and disciplinary areas. Others may vary to a differing extent. The important point to keep in mind, though, is that we as researchers, instructors, presenters, and listeners should be aware that a situational variation may or may not trigger variation in the language presenters use. Such awareness will help us determine the characteristics that have a strong impact on a register and distinguish them from the ones which are less impactful. Description of the SAP Corpus and its Situational Characteristics The SAP corpus, on which the research presented in Chaps. 3 and 4 is based, contains 100,280 words of student academic presentations (N = 50). The presentations were recorded in several programs at three US universities. Only the presenters’ speech was included in the corpus (i.e., the question-and-answer discourse at the end of the presentations was not included in the data). The corpus contains a range of different types of academic presentations college students in the Humanities and Social Sciences are usually assigned to give. In general, the data do not represent any particular discipline or area of study in the Humanities and Social Studies as the goal was to create a reasonably balanced specialized corpus with samples from a number of disciplinary areas. In what follows I will provide a description of the situational characteristics of the sub-register of student presentations as represented by the SAP corpus which is based on Biber and Conrad’s (2009) framework of descriptors. The information, which follows the categories below, was

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c­ ollected with a questionnaire completed by the participants at the time of data collection. Participants The presentations were delivered by 50 different individual presenters who, at the time of data collection, were novice graduate students (i.e., students in their first year of study in a graduate program). The participants were all NSs of American English of both genders (n = 11 males and n = 39 females) between the ages of 21 and 61 (Mage = 30 years). In terms of disciplinary expertise, the students were enrolled in several different graduate programs (English Literature Studies, Latin American Studies, Teacher Preparation Program, Applied Linguistics, In-service Teacher Training, and TESOL Certificate Program). Nonetheless, they shared some common interest and background knowledge in the areas of linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and education. Being enrolled in a graduate program also means that all participants were holding a previous undergraduate degree which, in some cases, was in a similar disciplinary area in which they were completing their graduate studies. The students were all experienced users of academic language though not necessarily in all text varieties. In terms of experience with giving academic presentations, the students reported that they had to give on average about four presentations per term in various courses, but only about half of them (n = 27 students or 54%) reported to have had previous training in presentation design and delivery either as part of an undergraduate coursework in academic communication or high school training in public speaking. Nonetheless, they all considered it important to have good presentation skills (M = 5.5 on a six-point Likert scale) and self-evaluated their current state of presentation skills as moderately high (M = 3.9 on a six-point Likert scale).  elations among the Participants R Typically, in higher education Anglophone culture, in a presentation situation, students engage in, at least, two roles in their class communities— they are presenters as well as members of the primary audience of listeners of other students’ presentations. It is also common for students from different programs to take some classes together and get to know each other in the process of working together, which was the case with some of the students whose presentations were included in the SAP corpus. The class environment generally fosters intellectual curiosity, interaction, and a

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r­elationship of positivity, mutual respect, and accommodation of others. Thus, the presentations were given before an audience of peers who not only shared some degree of specialized background knowledge with the presenters but also a relationship of equality and friendliness. Even though the presenters’ instructors were also part of the audience, in terms of power relations, their presence was perceived as non-threatening since, in most cases, they had played an active role as consultants for the informational content of the presentations. Perhaps, the relationships among the participants also motivated presenters’ attempts to interact with their audience in this largely monologic speech event—a feature of academic presentations that has recently attracted some attention in the research literature (e.g., Rendle-Short 2006; Zareva 2009b). Nonetheless, on a discourse level, the presentations were organized more like a monologue than a conversation—i.e. turn-­ taking was suspended (though, occasionally, a presentation may have been interrupted by a clarification question or brief comment from the audience) and the presenters held the speaking rights for the duration of their presentations (Rendle-Short 2006).  hannel and Mode of Delivery C By and large, the face-to-face channel of interaction and oral mode of delivery have been found to be two of the most influential situational characteristics that trigger the use of specific linguistic forms and, respectively, best distinguish between texts produced in speech and writing (Biber 1988, 2006; Biber et al. 1999; Swales 2004). The student presentation is an interesting sub-register in this regard because both spoken and written texts are involved in shaping its informational content. For instance, in preparing the content of their presentations, students may use materials such as videos and recorded lectures as well as lecture notes or other written sources like books, textbooks, journals, reports, etc. When we add the spoken mode of content delivery to the variety of oral and written sources shaping the informational content, we should reasonably expect that some linguistic features of the presentations will be closer to speech while others will bear more similarities to writing. For example, Zareva (2013) found that the participants in her study had a preference to project their scholarly selves in their presentations by staying close to the identity roles typical of written academic discourse. At the same time, they also commonly projected their personal and social selves, particularly in relation to the topics of their presentations, which suggested a strong influence coming from

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the spoken registers. Thus, the informational channel of content building and mode of delivery of the presentations should be expected to trigger mixed linguistic features linked to both speech and writing. Production Circumstances By and large, the production circumstances of any discourse (e.g., time limit, planning, designing, rehearsing, etc.) are strongly influenced by its mode of delivery. Academic presentations are a spoken academic discourse. However, unlike conversations where speakers produce language at the time of thinking about what they are going to say, academic presentations are a pre-planned speech event. In that sense, student presenters have to go through a whole process of designing their presentations before delivering them. All presentations in the SAP corpus were assigned at the beginning of the respective terms in which they were recorded and were routinely scheduled to be given toward the end of those terms, which means that the students had a relatively long period of time to prepare for them. Also, they all satisfied a course requirement for a final project presentation in the respective courses and, in that sense, they can be considered a naturally produced discourse (i.e., they were not prepared or delivered for experimental or research purposes). The information students discussed in their presentations was based on their own research (theoretical or empirical) on topics/areas of their own choice and interest. This means that the students had to make planning decisions at several levels, including choosing a topic, researching the informational content, organizing it in some logical fashion, designing visuals (e.g., handout, PowerPoint slides, etc.), and, oftentimes, preparing notes or flash cards for themselves to aid their smooth delivery. The time allotted for the presentations was limited by the respective course instructors. In the case of the presentations in the SAP corpus, the time limit was between 15 and 20 minutes and the presenters tended to observe the allotted presentation time (M = 13.7 min. length of presentations only). In terms of rehearsing the delivery of the presentations, the majority of the student presenters reported to have rehearsed their presentations beforehand (n = 37 or 66%) and about half of the students (n = 24 or 48%) reported to have made notes for themselves, which suggests that many have put some conscious effort into planning not only the content of their presentations but their language usage as well.

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All presentations were delivered extemporaneously (i.e., without directly reading from notes, script, or PowerPoint slides). Importantly, all of the presentations in the SAP corpus were evaluated as successful presentations by the respective instructors, who have given them grades in the highest grade range. In other words, the grade was used as a measure of the presentations’ effectiveness for the purposes they were assigned to be delivered and the goals they were expected  to meet from learning and presentational point of view. Respectively, this means that the lexical features discussed in Chap. 3 (the lexical profiles of presentations) and Chap. 4 (collocational usage) should be interpreted as typical of successful student academic presentations. Setting The physical setting of where student presentations are delivered is perhaps one of the situational characteristics that shows the most uniformity across educational institutions. All presentations were given in a classroom setting before small audiences of peers (the audience ranged from 16 to 23 students). The time and place of the discourse was shared among the participants. All classrooms were technology mediated and the presenters had access to a computer, projecting devices (e.g., projector, document camera), and the internet. All student presenters had designed and used visuals (primarily, PowerPoint slides) to support their presentation delivery, and some had also incorporated digital media into their presentation designs. Communicative Purposes Generally, student academic presentations combine multiple communicative purposes, which adds an additional layer of complexity to the speech event. Biber and Conrad (2009) proposed four main kinds of communicative purposes that can influence speakers’ language choices—i.e.: (1) general communicative purposes which include narrating, describing, informing, explaining, persuading, etc.; (2) specific communicative purposes such as summarizing or synthesizing information from numerous sources, explaining opposing views, describing research methods, presenting research findings, etc.; (3) factuality-related communicative purposes—i.e. stating facts, hypothesizing, speculating, etc.; and (4) overt or covert expression of stance—i.e. the expression of a range meanings associated with the expression of beliefs, opinions, value judgments, or ­assessments. In reality, the student presenters, whose presentations were included in the SAP corpus, had to accommodate all these purposes in

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their presentations to a varying extent. However, many reported that one of their greatest challenge was how to adequately balance the multiple communicative purposes they were expected to satisfy, considering the type of their presentations, the time limit, and their general lack of previous presentation experience, training, and guidance from their instructors. Nonetheless, the high grades assigned to the presentations can give us a reasonably high degree of certainty that the students were successful in meeting the communicative purposes of their presentations as evaluated by their instructors, who are seasoned professional conference presenters themselves. Topic The topic of academic presentations is generally an open-ended category that can range from discipline-general to discipline-specific. Ideally, presentation topics are prompted by a match between students’ interests and the course content of the class in which the presentations were assigned. At the higher levels of tertiary education in Anglophone academic culture (which is the case with the presentations in the SAP corpus), students usually choose the topics of their presentations on their own and decide (sometimes with the help of their instructors) how to narrow them down, what notions to emphasize, what logical connection to make across concepts and sub-topics, what research methodology to use, what information sources are useful to review, etc. The SAP corpus presenters followed the same tradition of personally choosing topics and individually researching and designing their presentations. To sum, as Biber and Conrad (2009) advise, the first step in conducting a register analysis is to identify and describe its situational characteristics. The description of the situational characteristics surrounding the presentations in the SAP corpus can be considered a close reflection of the situational characteristics that are typical of the sub-register of student academic presentations in Anglophone culture. In that, they are a useful starting point not only for the linguistic analysis of the sub-register itself but also cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. After the presentations were audio-recorded, they were transcribed orthographically. Once the corpus was created, it was prepared for analysis by tagging it for parts of speech (PoS) for the purposes of the collocational analysis (see Chap. 4). After all tags were manually checked, the data ­analyses were carried out by using several programs, which are detailed in subsequent chapters.

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Overview of the Book As mentioned earlier, the central focus of this book is on the analysis of several lexical features of student academic presentations in relation to the notion of speech adjustments student presenters make to accommodate their listeners in the discourse. Needless to say, the notion of speech accommodation is a broad one and the analyses presented in this book can only be seen as a start in this direction. My hope is that the wealth of the linguistic features associated with speech accommodation will be systematically uncovered in future research and, equally importantly, incorporated in materials designed to develop students’ presentational competence. Before going into the language analysis itself, Chap. 2 offers a survey of a number of books and manuals on designing and delivering effective academic presentations, published between 2000 and 2017. The main objectives of the survey were to determine how the Anglophone academic culture views the genre/sub-register of academic presentations, what the notion of effectiveness entails, what specific language features the published sources recommend in relation to audience accommodation, and the extent to which these language recommendations are based on large natural language data sources vs. the authors’ personal experience with academic presentations. Overall, the survey revealed that the majority of the reviewed sources are primarily how-to manuals, designed to give some general advice about presentation design and delivery to novice presenters in various disciplinary areas. This is probably one of the main reasons why they do not offer much of an in-depth treatment of the language of academic presentations, especially in light of making them audience-friendly. To offer a starting point in this direction, the following two chapters deal with two lexical aspects of student presentations. Chapter 3 looks at the lexical composition of the presentations in the SAP corpus at a single word level. Considering that some of the main functions of speech adjustment are to facilitate listeners’ information comprehension during their online processing of complex informational content, presenters’ lexical choices should be seen as an observable aspect of this kind of accommodation behavior in speech—an aspect which has received relatively little attention in the context of academic presentations. So, the chapter focuses on what is lexically “typical” of successful student presentations, the extent to which the lexical composition of presentations contributes to the formal or informal aspect of this oral academic sub-register, and how

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student presenters’ lexical choices possibly facilitate both the online production of speech and its online processing on the part of the audience. Chapter 4 takes a look at the use of collocations in students’ presentations. Usage-based research has consistently shown that language use is largely formulaic and a competent use of formulaic language, including collocations, is an important aspect of fluent natural language production and comprehension. Given that the sub-register of student academic presentations has not been researched with regard to collocation usage as much as writing has, the focus of this chapter is on student presenters’ use of noun-noun and adjective-noun collocations in their presentations. Realizing that the prevalence of formulaic expressions (including collocations as a type of formulaic language) is driven by both speaker-related and listener-oriented motivations, the discussion of the findings links the functions of collocations to possible benefits they bring for listeners from a speech accommodation perspective. Finally, Chap. 5 puts it all together by reviewing the main findings of the volume. It opens with a brief discussion of the advantages that small-­ scale specialized corpora, like the one used in the book, offer for the discovery of linguistic features that are typical of specialized texts. This is followed by a synthesis of the main findings and take-aways from each chapter with an eye on their practical significance from teaching, learning, and research point of view.

References Aune, R. K., & Kikuchi, T. (1993). Effects of language intensity similarity on perceptions of credibility, relational attributions, and persuasion. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 12, 224–238. Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. (2006). University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style. New York: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). The Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman. Bourhis, R.  Y., Montaruli, E., & Amiot, C.  E. (2007). Language planning and French-English bilingual communication: Montreal field studies from 1977 to 1997. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 185, 187–224.

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Chivers, B., & Shoolbred, M. (2007). A student’s guide to presentations: Making your presentation count. London: Sage. Crook, C.  W., & Booth, R. (1997). Building rapport in electronic mail using accommodation theory. SAM Advanced Management Journal, 62, 4–13. Davis, M., Davis, K. J., & Dunagan, M. M. (2012). Scientific papers and presentations (3rd ed.). London: Elsevier. Dragojevic, M., Gasiorek, J., & Giles, H. (2016). Accommodative strategies as core of the theory. In H. Giles (Ed.), Communication accommodation theory: Negotiating personal relationships and social identities across contexts (pp. 36–59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engleberg, I., & Daly, J. (2005). Presentations in everyday life: Strategies for effective speaking. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company. Gasiorek, J. (2016). Theoretical perspectives on interpersonal adjustments in language and communication. In H. Giles (Ed.), Communication accommodation theory: Negotiating personal relationships and social identities across contexts (pp. 13–35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giles, H. (2016a). Communication accommodation theory. In H.  Giles (Ed.), Communication accommodation theory: Negotiating personal relationships and social identities across contexts (pp. i–ii). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giles, H. (Ed.). (2016b). Communication accommodation theory: Negotiating personal relationships and social identities across contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giles, H., Scherer, K. R., & Taylor, D. M. (1979). Speech markers in social interaction. In K.  R. Scherer & H.  Giles (Eds.), Social markers in speech (pp. 343–381). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levin, P., & Topping, G. (2006). Perfect presentations! Student-friendly guides. New York: Open University Press. Linnemann, G.  A., & Jucks, R. (2016). As in the question, so in the answer? Language style of human and machine speakers affects interlocutors’ convergence on wordings. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 35(6), 686–697. McCarthy, P., & Hatcher, C. (2002). Presentation skills: The essential guide for students. London: Sage. McGlone, M. S., & Giles, H. (2011). Language and interpersonal communication. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 201–237). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Okeke, G. T., Mbah, B. M., & Okeke, C. O. (2018). Sociolinguistic analysis of the language of palm wine drinkers’ Club (Kegite). Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 9(4), 856–868. Rendle-Short, J. (2006). The academic presentation: Situated talk in action. London: Routledge. Rice, R. E., & Giles, H. (2017). The contexts and dynamics of science communication and language. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 36(1), 127–139.

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Riordan, M.  A., Markman, K.  M., & Stewart, C.  O. (2013). Communication accommodation in instant messaging: An examination of temporal convergence. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 32, 84–95. Street, R. L., & Giles, H. (1982). Speech accommodation theory: A social cognitive approach to language and speech behavior. In M. E. Roloff & C. R. Berger (Eds.), Social cognition and communication (pp.  33–53). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Swales, J.  M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J.  M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zareva, A. (2009a). Informational packaging, level of formality, and the use of circumstance adverbials in L1 and L2 student academic presentations. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8, 55–68. Zareva, A. (2009b). Student academic presentations: The processing side of interactiveness. English Text Construction, 2(2), 265–288. Zareva, A. (2012). Lexical composition of effective L1 and L2 student academic presentations. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(1), 91–110. Zareva, A. (2013). Self-mention and the projection of multiple identity roles in TESOL graduate student presentations: The influence of the written academic genres. English for Specific Purposes, 32, 72–83. Zareva, A. (2019a). Providing feedback on the lexical use of ESP students’ academic presentations: Teacher training considerations. In S.  Papadima-­ Sophocleous, E.  Kakoulli Constantinou, & C.  N. Giannikas (Eds.), ESP teaching and teacher education: Current theories and practices (pp.  63–78). Research-publishing.net. Zareva, A. (2019b). Lexical complexity of academic presentations: Similarities despite situational differences. Journal of Second Language Studies, 2(1), 72–93.

CHAPTER 2

Survey of Books and Guides on Academic Presentations

Abstract  The chapter provides a survey of a number of books and guides on academic presentations, published between 2000 and 2017. The main objectives of the survey are to determine how the Anglophone academic culture views the genre of academic presentations, what the notion of effectiveness entails, what specific language features the sources promote in relation to audience accommodation, and the extent to which these language recommendations are data-based. Overall, the survey revealed a remarkable degree of consistency with regard to the general principles underlying the genre of academic presentations in oral English academic discourse. However, most of the surveyed sources diverged (and lacked) in the depth and breadth of their treatment of specific aspects of the language of academic presentations that make it audience-friendly. Keywords  Academic presentations • Audience accommodation • Presentation advice • Presentation effectiveness • Language recommendations Compared to academic writing, the academic presentation as a genre and sub-register is fairly loosely defined and less rigorously taught at all levels of education. In recent years, however, the attention to it has substantially

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increased because educators have realized that presentations not only encourage students’ own active learning but also prepare them for a ­professional experience that increasingly values effective presentation giving competence (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Zareva 2009, 2012). Yet, it is fairly unclear what counts as an effective academic presentation and what role language plays in its success (though, most certainly, everybody who has been in academia long enough has some criteria of effectiveness in mind and, most probably, these criteria are both culture-bound and discipline-­specific). The impression of a uniform concept of an “effective” or “successful” presentation is largely reinforced by the abundance of books and guides available to teach and develop presentation skills across a variety of disciplines. These sources are all designed to ensure that the various types of presentations students deliver (e.g., class presentations, research presentations, seminars, oral reports, etc.) are in line with disciplinary expectations of effectiveness. However, the vagueness of the notion itself begs the question of whether, within Anglophone academic culture, effectiveness is a more homogeneous or a more nuanced concept and the extent to which the language recommended to be used in academic presentations (in order to increase their effectiveness) is data-based and listener-oriented. Finding answers to these questions involved surveying recently published mainstream presentation books and guides available on the market, with the goal of drawing up an inventory of “effective” presentation features noted in these sources, particularly ones specifically related to listener accommodation. The rest of the chapter discusses the survey and its findings which are focused on three main aspects of academic presentations as viewed from a listener accommodation point of view—i.e. (1) general principles upon which academic presentations are developed, (2) the notion of effectiveness, and (3) specific language advice for speech adjustments the authors of the surveyed sources recommend. The next section provides a description of the surveyed sources, the selection criteria for their inclusion in the survey, and a brief description of the main aspects of interest in the survey. This is followed by a discussion of the main findings, guided by a listener-oriented perspective of the conclusions.

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Survey of Books and Guides on Academic Presentations There is a plethora of books and guides on developing “effective” and “successful” presentations on the market. Most of them target novice presenters among college students and/or professionals who may need to develop or brush up on their presentation design and delivery skills. The main objectives of the current survey are to determine how Anglophone academic culture views the notion of effectiveness of presentations, the specific language features the presentation guides promote, particularly as they relate to the perception of effectiveness in terms of audience accommodation, and the extent to which these features are based on large natural language data sources (vs. personal observations). The main selection criteria for the presentation sources to be included in the survey were (1) to be published in English, (2) to be designed to teach presentation skills to college students in Anglophone academic culture (or, at least, this group to be targeted as a potential reading audience), (3) to have their primary focus on presentation speaking rather than public speaking in general, and (4) to have been published between 2000 and 2017. The sources that were consulted (n = 10) during this survey varied in terms of targeted readership in several ways. Discipline-wise, the surveyed sources focused on several broadly defined areas, ranging from being non-­ discipline-­ specific (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Engleberg and Daly 2005; Levin and Topping 2006; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002; Reinhart 2002; Schwabish 2017) to being targeted mainly at the scientific community (Anholt 2006; Davis et al. 2012; Patience et al. 2015; Platow 2002). Based on the authors’ description of their targeted readership, the materials were written primarily for native speakers of English (NESs) though most authors noted that users of English as a second or subsequent language can also benefit from the guidance they offer. The only exception is Reinhart’s (2002) book, which was primarily written for advanced non-­ native speakers of English (NNESs) preparing for university studies in English-based higher education institutions. However, the author commented that the book could be successfully used with NESs as well. In terms of educational level, the surveyed sources were designed to inform and help advanced college students and/or professionals develop good presentation skills as part of the requirements of their professional and/or educational experiences.

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Perhaps the reason why this readership segment was predominantly targeted is because the academic presentation becomes a more prominent form of information display and knowledge dissemination at those higher levels of professional competence and expertise. Of course, that does not mean that the development of academic presentation skills should be postponed until that level of educational experience is reached. It simply means that, traditionally in Anglophone academic culture, it is at the higher levels of education at which mastery of presentation competence becomes essential in many disciplinary areas (see Chap. 1 for a discussion about the value of academic presentations). Along the same lines, since the reviewed sources had a wider readership scope than students only, the discussion in this chapter will necessarily be about academic presentations rather than limited to student academic presentations. In other words, the two notions will be viewed as nested, with academic presentations being the superordinate one. Finally, two of the books (i.e., Davis et al. 2012; Patience et al. 2015) had a supplementary focus on scientific papers and poster presentations in addition to their focus on academic presentations. Even though they were not exclusively written with a single focus on academic presentations, these books were included in the survey because they offered a valuable perspective of connectivity between genres and modalities—a relationship that Swales (2004) referred to as “genre chains” (pp. 22–23). That is, a genre chain captures chronological and logical sequences of genres which may have intertextual relationships—e.g., a research report may lead to an academic presentation, a presentation may lead to a scientific paper or article, or a poster presentation at a conference. Thus, combining the discussion of academic presentations with a discussion about academic writing establishes a natural link between oral and written academic prose, hence, the inclusion of the two books in the survey. The review of the surveyed sources resulted in three main areas of interest (as related to the primary objectives of the survey) which will be addressed in more detail in the discussion that follows. Thus, necessarily, certain aspects that were more speaker- than listener-oriented, such as awareness of various speech types, speech giving and visual design skills, nerve relaxing techniques, vocal projection, the use of different technologies for presentation purposes, designing tables and graphs, etc., were left out of the discussion. It should also be noted here that, given the relatively small number of reviewed sources, the survey is by no means comprehensive. Rather, it is intended to provide an initial summary of how recently

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published sources treat the genre/sub-register of academic presentations with respect to the main areas of interest in this chapter. So, the primary focus of the survey and the discussion of the results are based on the following aspects of academic presentations: 1. General principles upon which they are developed that are specifically noted in the surveyed sources (e.g., clarity, precision, objectivity, persuasion, etc.). 2. The notion of effectiveness of academic presentations in terms of what it entails and what presentations count as effective or successful. 3. Specific language recommendations for speech adjustments aimed at listener accommodation (e.g., recommendations about degree of formality, lexical and syntactic features, advice about vocabulary or the use of formulaic language, etc.). Along those lines, it was of interest to find out the extent to which the recommendations were based on large language data source(s) vs. the authors’ personal experience with academic presentations and, respectively, suggestions stemming from those experiences.

Findings from the Survey Overall, there seemed to be a general consensus among the consulted sources about what the most salient characteristics of academic presentations are from an Anglophone cultural perspective. Interestingly, even though the surveyed sources offered help and guidance to readership associated with several broad disciplinary areas, there were many similarities in their recommendations which suggests that the genre of academic presentations is relatively conventionalized in Anglophone academic culture. In what follows, I will address some of the claims made in the surveyed sources with regard to the three aspects of interest in this chapter. The discussion will be guided by the question of how the recommendations associated with these three aspects contribute to the listener orientation of the suggestions. General Principles of Academic Presentation Development As mentioned earlier, all surveyed sources on academic presentations were designed to inform and help college students (among other groups of

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readers) at more advanced levels of their education (e.g., at a master’s or doctoral level) develop good presentation skills. Definitions of academic presentations (or student academic presentations for that matter) were rarely to be found in the consulted sources. Rather, most authors discussed broadly the notion of presentation as a monolithic one, which included class presentations, conference presentations, seminars, lectures, job talks, and other speech events associated with academia. For instance, McCarthy and Hatcher (2002) defined presentation as “any opportunity you get to communicate your point of view to listening others” (p. 1), and Levin and Topping (2006) echoed this general definition by explaining that “by presentation we mean a talk or speech given by a presenter (sometimes more than one) to an audience of two or more people” (p. 4). While it is true that all different types of academic presentations share some situational characteristics, they also differ in some important ways. So, lumping them together under the umbrella term of presentation gives the impression that, for instance, class presentations and all other types of presentations are more or less overlapping genres/sub-registers—an assumption that is not easily justifiable as it ignores purpose and situational characteristics as influential features of any discourse (see Chap. 1 for a discussion of the situational characteristics of student academic presentations). Another shared characteristic across the surveyed sources was that they all primarily attended to the needs of the presenters as speakers. However, most authors explicitly stated that by doing so, they also intend to sharpen presenters’ sensitivity to their audience(s) of listeners and enhance their critical thinking when they themselves assume the role of listeners. Thus, the surveyed sources clearly established the speaker-as-listener perspective from which they encouraged their readers to consider all suggestions and recommendations for presentation design and delivery. Regardless of the different perspectives taken in the surveyed sources, they all provided some reference to the general principles underlying the development of academic presentations. For instance, they all referred to two distinctive, yet connected, stages of the process—the preparation stage and the delivery stage. They were also unanimous on that most of the work that makes an academic presentation successful should be done during the preparation stage. This is the stage at which listeners are at the center of most decisions to ensure that a presentation is well-alighted with the purpose of the discourse and the audience for which it is designed. The delivery stage is in many ways a by-product of the preparation stage and,

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even though it has its own challenges, they are mostly speaker-related (especially if the listener-orientated decisions have already been made during the preparation stage). A second general principle of academic presentations that all surveyed sources mentioned is that presentations are designed with a specific audiences in mind. As Levin and Topping (2006) put it: Presentation is not only given to the audience, it is given for the audience. It certainly isn’t just a speech launched in the general direction of the audience with a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude. It follows that when you are preparing a presentation you should always have the needs and interests of your audience at the forefront of your mind. (Levin and Topping 2006, p. 4)

Thus, the listener orientation necessarily requires an audience analysis on several levels, ranging from its composition, the language it is accustomed to, and its general expertise to its values and level of sophistication. A third general principle on which academic presentations are built is that, even though a presentation is a monologic speech act, communication with the audience is at the heart of it—i.e. a presentation should be viewed as a dialogue with the audience rather than a monologue (Anholt 2006; Engleberg and Daly 2005). In fact, some authors (Levin and Topping 2006; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002) even point out the distinction between performance-oriented presentations and communication-­ oriented ones with regard to listeners. That is, in a performance-oriented presentation, speakers assume that the audience is there primarily to entertain and evaluate a presentation, while in a communication-oriented one presenters assume that their listeners are there for the message. Hence, the success of such presentations is measured by the extent to which the listeners understand the message (McCarthy and Hatcher 2002). Another shared general principle is that academic presentations are a rehearsed oral academic discourse. All surveyed sources brought up the necessity and value of a presentation being practiced several times in full, including with all prompts and technology. Even though most of the benefits seemed to be speaker-related (e.g., to help the presenter “internalize” the presentation and free mental resources, set an appropriate presentation pace that matches the time allotment, synchronize the operation of the equipment with the oral text of the presentation, boost presenters’ confidence, etc.), most authors argued that the practice of a presentation delivery also comes with listener-oriented benefits. For example, (1) practice helps

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increase the precision of expression of the oral text to better aid ­listener comprehension, (2)  it helps with identifying content that needs to be emphasized in certain ways for the audience (e.g., through the use of body language, slide design, tone and intonation, etc.) in order to become more salient and memorable, (3)  it improves the fluency of the presentation delivery which listeners usually expect from a presentation, (4)  it helps with setting an appropriate speech rate that accommodates both the time limit set for the delivery and the processing needs of listeners, etc. Thus, rehearsal is more than a general recommendation; it is a necessary step in the process where planning meets the reality of the product for final touches before it is put on public display. Next, academic presentations are a highly structured discourse not only because they are based on factual material, but also because they are always given within a specific time limit, which puts an additional pressure on both presenters and listeners. That is, presenters need to prepare to discuss the most important points of their message within a certain time limit, which requires them to make important decisions about how to communicate to their audience the most important contributions of their research and what details they should leave out (Engleberg and Daly 2005; Patience et al. 2015; Platow 2002; Schwabish 2017). From a listener point of view, a well-organized presentation is easier to listen to and understand because complex ideas are sequenced in a logical and easy-to-follow way. Additionally, many of the surveyed sources noted the three-step guide to organization of a presentation which goes like this—“Tell’em what you’re gonna tell them; tell’em; then tell’em what you told’em.” Needless to say, there is more than the “Tell’em Technique” (Engleberg and Daly 2005, p. 193) to good presentation organization. However, it underscores the value of repetition as a principle of organizing academic presentations from a listener vantage point—i.e. listeners benefit if they know what the central ideas of a presentation will be, they benefit if they hear the central points more than once, and, finally, a summary of the main arguments helps them remember the content they have heard (Engleberg and Daly 2005). The highly organized nature of academic presentations necessarily takes us to the final general principle shared by the surveyed sources—i.e. the content of the presentation itself as its central component. In fact, all the other general principles can be put to work only if a presenter has something meaningful to say (Platow 2002, p. x). Variations in content and organization will inevitably be influenced by the different audiences for

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whom a presentation is designed, the nature of the content itself, as well as the questions the audience will expect a presentation to address. For instance, the content of experimental research presented before an audience of peers will most likely be influenced by a scientific method of inquiry. Thus, it will be expected to reflect a recognition of a problem, formulation of research questions and hypotheses, explanation of the experimentation, data analyses, and drawing conclusions. By contrast, an audience attending a presentation based on a theoretical overview of an issue will seek answers to different kinds of questions—e.g., questions related to when the issue was recognized as problematic or what the various perspectives on it are, or what the time frame of the theoretical developments on the issue is, etc. Thus, differences in informational content will necessarily trigger variations in the organization of a presentation, aimed primarily at accommodating questions the audience will expect to find answers to in that presentation. Equally importantly, listeners will also be likely to have certain expectations about the use of conventional techniques applied to the organization of the informational content of a presentation so that it matches their schema. Effectiveness of Academic Presentations The second aspect of interest in this survey was the notion of effective and successful academic presentations and how it was treated in the reviewed sources. Not surprisingly, the notion of effectiveness turned out to be a very broad one because, on the one hand, there are different aspects of effectiveness associated with each stage of a presentation development, design, and delivery. On the other hand, the authors of the surveyed sources seemed to have varied perspectives on it. They all seemed to agree that effectiveness requires a conscious effort. However, few of them had devoted specific sections or chapters to explain what makes an academic presentation effective and successful. Of the ten reviewed sources, only Levin and Topping (2006) had a section on the “ingredients of a successful presentation” (pp.  6–7), and Chivers and Shoolbred (2007) had devoted a whole chapter to the key principles of developing effective presentations (see Chapter 2 in their book for a useful and detailed discussion). The authors of the rest of the surveyed sources had intertwined more subtly and implicitly the idea of success and effectiveness in their discussions and recommendations.

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The characteristics of effective presentations that will be discussed in the following paragraphs are only the ones that were explicitly linked to the notion of effectiveness in the surveyed materials. Naturally, all of the sources assumed that the idea of successful and effective presentations encompasses all general principles discussed in the previous section. That is, an effective academic presentation (1) is relevant, useful, and interesting in content for the audience for which it is designed; (2) its content is well-structured and logically organized to be easy for the audience to understand; (3) repetition of the central points is an organization principle behind the informational packaging of an effective presentation; (4) it is designed for an audience with specific characteristics; (5) it is a well-­ rehearsed oral academic discourse delivered within (6) a specific time limit; and (7) communication with the audience is at the heart of a successful academic presentation. In addition to these general principles, the authors of the surveyed guides proposed various characteristics of successful presentations, some of which were related to the preparation stage, others were linked to the delivery, and a third set were audience-related. Overall, as Chivers and Shoolbred (2007) put it succinctly, “[F]or presentations to be effective, they need to fulfill their aims and objectives, be enjoyable and offer developmental opportunities for the presenters and the audiences” (p.  30). “Effective presentations achieve their objectives and usually bring some benefit and learning to all the people involved in them, whether presenters, audience or tutors” (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007, p. 20). From a preparation point of view, some of the recommendations of what contributes to the success and effectiveness of presentations were as follows: • Clarity of structure and explanation help the audience gain a good understanding of the content of the presentation (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Davis et  al. 2012; Engleberg and Daly 2005; Patience et al. 2015; Schwabish 2017), clarity of visual display better communicates complex content to listeners (Anholt 2006; Schwabish 2017), and clarity of articulation is expected of a good presenter (Engleberg and Daly 2005; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002). • Careful choice of examples provokes interest and improves understanding (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Engleberg and Daly 2005). • A thoughtful design of supporting documentation (e.g., handouts, list of key points, PowerPoint slides, links to further sources of infor-

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mation, etc.) is useful not only for the presenter but also for the audience during and after a presentation. • Appropriate choice of images communicates content information effectively, improves understanding, saves time, and increases interest and overall impact of presentations. • Careful choice of vocabulary that is familiar to the audience should also include avoiding the use of jargon and acronyms that may not be familiar to the audience and explaining terms that may either be novel or may be used with a novel interpretation (Anholt 2006; Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Davis et al. 2012; Engleberg and Daly 2005; Levin and Topping 2006; Patience et al. 2015; Reinhart 2002). • An effective presentation unfolds like a story, it is coherent and maintains the listeners’ attention by engaging them in the unfolding of ideas (Anholt 2006; Platow 2002). “A story has perspective, a context, a plot, and a climactic conclusion. A story should keep the listener spellbound and fascinate them while the plot unfolds” (Anholt 2006, p. 37). • Scientific presentations must also have scientific value (Engleberg and Daly 2005; Patience et al. 2015; Schwabish 2017), they should be based on evidence (Engleberg and Daly 2005; Levin and Topping 2006; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002), and its accurate interpretation (Anholt 2006; Patience et al. 2015; Platow 2002). • Several authors of the surveyed sources brought up the importance of ethics in effective presentations, which operates at several levels of decision making and includes the listeners as well (Davis et al. 2012; Engleberg and Daly 2005; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002). From a delivery point of view, the list of characteristics associated with what makes academic presentations effective was long and more varied. So, below are a number of select characteristics that were noted both in the general and the science-related sources on academic presentations. Naturally, some of the characteristics were associated with the speech delivery itself and included (1) delivering the message eloquently, (2) speaking energetically and enthusiastically so that the audience can also share the presenter’s excitement about the topic, (3) delivering the message persuasively to encourage the audience to consider the presenter’s viewpoints and attitudes, and (4) speaking naturally, without reading the screen, and at a controlled speech rate (e.g., Patience et al. (2015) recommended a rate of between 140 and 160 words per minute for presentation purposes). Along

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the same lines, given that the time allocated for delivering a presentation is always limited, effective presenters usually choose to deliver less content at a reasonable pace rather than too much content at a faster pace, which may overwhelm or confuse the audience. Another aspect of presentation delivery frequently associated with effectiveness was the use of appropriate non-verbal communication which is commonly associated with speakers’ use of vocal tone and volume, body language, physical appearance, eye contact, and facial expressions. Presenters need to be consciously aware that non-verbal communication carries meaning beyond the use of words and images, and, in that, it significantly contributes to the intended interpretation of the message in addition to communicating a wealth of meaning about the presenters themselves. Finally, the authors of all sources made a strong point that, in successful presentations, the use of technologies should match the purpose of the presentation and enhance its delivery rather than control or restrict it. In other words, the use of technology should facilitate communication in a way that helps the audience gain a better understanding of the content of the presentation rather than dominate the presentation itself. Respectively, in effective presentations, presenters make good use of both language and visuals by striking a balance between speech and slides/visuals. Lastly, the emphasis on strong audience orientation as a central, characteristic feature of effective presentations was prominently given in all surveyed sources. In fact, the general recommendation was that all presentation design and delivery decisions should be guided by presenters’ commitment to serving their audience and to getting the main points of their presentation across, both of which were recognized as crucial for the success of presentations. As Levin and Topping (2006) noted “a successful presentation is not only given to the audience, it is given for the audience. It certainly isn’t just a speech launched in the general direction of the audience with a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude” (p. 4). In successful presentations, presenters move their listeners effectively to a shared understanding of the main points of the presentation—i.e. “speakers must structure their presentations in such a way that listeners are clearly led from word to image, image to idea, idea to concept” (McCarthy and Hatcher 2002, p. 70). Importantly, the content of  a presentation  should be carefully matched not only to a presenter’s purpose but also to the listeners’ needs and values, especially in culturally diverse situations (Engleberg and Daly 2005; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002). Finally, different audiences have different expectations about academic presentations in terms of purpose, content, delivery

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style, etc., so effective presentations offer a good match for those expectations (Engleberg and Daly 2005; Levin and Topping 2006). As we can see, the list of characteristic features of what makes an academic presentation effective and successful is quite extensive, and it, undoubtedly, should be considered for presentation training, delivery, and evaluation purposes. After all, the more we, as presenters, are consciously aware of these characteristics, the more educated and efficient we will be as listeners of academic presentations. Language Recommendations for Speech Adjustments The last aspect of interest in the survey of books and guides on academic presentations was on specific language recommendations the authors made to presenters so that they can successfully accommodate their listeners. Similarly, the survey also aimed to find out the extent to which the recommendations were based on large natural language data source(s) vs. the authors’ personal experience with academic presentations. All reviewed sources addressed some aspects of language use in academic presentations to a varying extent—some did so in passing, others provided more elaborate discussions and language usage recommendations specifically in relation to audience accommodation. For example, most of Reinhart’s (2002) book was dedicated to language use for various purposes (e.g., opening a speech, concluding a presentation, description of objects and processes, the use of modals, linking words, etc. in process speeches, etc.) probably because it was primarily targeted at advanced NNES college students who were expected to give academic presentations as part of their studies. McCarthy and Hatcher (2002) devoted a chapter in their book to language use and discussed a wide spectrum of features they considered important in academic presentations—ranging from the choice of precise vocabulary to using rhetoric strategically (see Chapter 6 in their book). Engleberg and Daly (2005) have also included a chapter on engaging language (see Chapter 12  in their book) that they recommended to be used not only to promote the purpose of a presentation, but also to be engaging for the audience. Levin and Topping (2006) included a section in their book about making an academic presentation audience-­ friendly in which most of their discussion was about language use. The most general advice about audience-friendly language was to speak in a language with which the audience is familiar (Levin and Topping 2006; Davis et al. 2012). This recommendation was applied to units of

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various complexity—ranging from a word and phrase level to sentence level and longer units of discourse. In what follows, I will summarize the language recommendations the authors of the surveyed sources made, specifically the ones that were explicitly connected to listener accommodation at a sentence, phrase, and word level. At a sentence level, the recommendations for audience adjustments included some advice regarding the use of specific sentence types (e.g., rhetorical questions, declarative and imperative sentences), the grammar of sentences (e.g., tense, voice, modal verbs), sentence length and complexity, etc. For example, some of the recommendations were: • To break up long and/or complex sentences into short and straightforward ones because the audience does not have time to disentangle complex language as the presentation moves (Levin and Topping 2006). • To use complete sentences rather than sentence fragments, which usually occur when a sentence is abandoned midway for some reason without an attempt to repair or complete it. While finishing one’s sentences in a presentation mode may seem an obvious requirement, the pressure of online production presenters experience and their adopting a more informal approach to presenting may lead to incomplete sentences (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Engleberg and Daly 2005). Incomplete sentences, however, require listeners to put in extra effort to complete the speaker’s unfinished thought which sometimes may lead to confusion or misunderstanding. • To use different types of sentences for different emphasis purposes— for instance, while declarative sentences are the most common types in presentations, imperative sentences are best for instructing the audience to carry out a certain task and rhetorical questions are attention grabbers, relationship starters, and gradually lead listeners into the topic of a presentation (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Engleberg and Daly 2005; Patience et al. 2015; Reinhart 2002). • To use passive and active voice strategically (e.g., It was found that … (passive voice) cf. I/we found that … (active voice)) because they bring subtle differences in connotation for listeners. For example, active voice emphasizes the agent(s) and de-emphasizes outside influences, while passive voice brings the focus on whatever is in the subject position and de-emphasizes or sometimes even eliminates the agent(s) altogether (e.g., The experiment was carried out with two

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groups of learners) (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Engleberg and Daly 2005; Reinhart 2002). • To use figurative language such as metaphors selectively and with care (Engleberg and Daly 2005; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002) because “metaphors are much more than a language technique; they move audience from one realm of thought to another” (Engleberg and Daly 2005, p. 283). At the same time, several sources (Engleberg and Daly 2005; Levin and Topping 2006; McCarthy and Hatcher 2002) warned to avoid unusual or culturally biased figurative language (e.g., idioms, similes, metaphors) with audiences that include non-native English listeners as this kind of language may get them confused and distracted from the main message of the presentation. • To use repetition at several structural levels, including at a sentence level, to ease listeners’ comprehension of highlighted ideas since listeners process the complex informational content of a presentation online as the speaker moves along with the content (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Davis et al. 2012; Engleberg and Daly 2005; Levin and Topping 2006). By and large, the general impression from the survey was that, when it comes to language recommendations for listener accommodation at a sentence level, the treatment of this area is more sporadic and less consistent across the reviewed sources. It is possible that the reason behind this state of affairs is because the sources have been primarily written as “how-to” guides for NES users (with the exception of Reinhart’s (2002) book). Thus, the authors probably assumed that their targeted readers are not linguistic neophytes and are familiar with sentence-level accommodations that could benefit their listeners. In my own experience with student academic presentations, this is a slippery assumption. Student presenters may be theoretically and implicitly aware of many of the above noted recommendations, but they do not necessarily apply them to their language choices consciously and/or consistently. So, a more elaborate discussion of the grammar of academic presentations in published sources will not be redundant but beneficial. It will bring the specific effects of certain syntactic features to presenters’ consciousness and encourage them to plan on using these structures intentionally rather than rely mostly  on their intuitions. Word-level recommendations in relation to listener accommodation were also not in abundance in the reviewed sources. Overall, the authors

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who referred to vocabulary choices urged the presenters to avoid jargon and/or pretentious or pompous vocabulary in favor of “short everyday words.” Some of the recommendations that were more commonly noted in the surveyed sources were: • To adjust the level of unfamiliar terminology and specialized vocabulary to the audience and aid listeners’ comprehension by explaining terms in plain language or including definitions, examples, and explanations of acronyms (Davis et  al. 2012; Levin and Topping 2006; Patience et al. 2015). • To avoid jargon that may not be intelligible to an uninitiated audience because “if the audience has to invest part of its limited energy to decipher less familiar terms, less energy will remain for attending to the scientific content of the presentation” (Anholt 2006, p. 59). Plus, as Davis et  al. (2012) rightly noted, “in any communication effort, the objective is to make your audience understand, not to “snow ’em” with self-important, bombastic jargon” (p. 224). • To aim at precision in vocabulary choices which will, respectively, result in a clear and unambiguous interpretation of the message (Anholt 2006; Engleberg and Daly 2005; Schwabish 2017)—for example, the choice of verbs should correspond to a precise reference in the intended message (e.g., the data demonstrate … vs. the data support … vs. the data seem to suggest …, etc.). This short list of lexical recommendations implies that advice about vocabulary choices was scarce across all surveyed sources. The fact that this linguistic aspect was barely touched upon in most manuals indicates that it is taken for granted that presenters are aware of what lexical choices are suitable for presentation purposes and they do not need much guidance about making such choices. If that may be the case, this is another dubious assumption. Novice presenters need to know more about the nature of vocabulary they should use in their presentations (e.g., the different frequency bands and their coverage in oral academic texts, the distinction between basic and sophisticated vocabulary and how each category is represented in real-life presentations, the distinction between vocabulary use in academic speech and writing, etc.). This kind of knowledge would not only sharpen the focus of any language-related advice included in the published literature on presentation design and delivery, but will also heighten presenters’ awareness of how lexical choices work

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together with listener accommodation and the overall notion of effectiveness associated with this genre. Language Data Foundation of the Surveyed Sources The last point the survey addressed was the nature of language data the surveyed sources were based on in their giving linguistic advice or specific examples of appropriate language for presentation purposes. Sadly, of the ten surveyed sources, only one (i.e., Reinhart 2002) was based on naturally produced corpus data in oral academic discourse. As the author herself explained in the introduction of the book, examples and sections in the book (especially the ones related to improving speaker-listener interaction) were taken from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) (Simpson et al. 2002), which was compiled at the University of Michigan between 1999 and 2000 (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/ cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple). There are a multitude of language examples of different complexity for various purposes in the text (e.g., single word examples to illustrate the use of adverbials and modal verbs, formulaic-like language for opening and concluding presentations, organization indicators, checking for audience understanding, responding to questions from the audience, etc.) all taken from the corpus itself. These corpus-based examples not only give credibility to the language recommendations, but also align them with the bigger context of language usage for academic presentation purposes across the disciplines. The rest of the surveyed sources also included language examples to a varying extent, most of which were at a sentence level (e.g., to model a response) or in the form of sentence frames for various purposes (e.g., to illustrate the recommendation of using numbered lists and brief repetitions, Levin and Topping (2006) suggested the following sentence frames: “There are three things to notice. First, … The second thing to notice is … The third thing to notice is…” (p. 88). Generally, in the absence of clear explanations about the sources of the suggested language, we can assume that recommendations are based on the authors’ personal experiences and observations of academic presentations. As valuable and informing these experiences and observations are, it would be more valuable to supplement them with data-based recommendations that would identify trends and variability in the language of presentations, either within a specific disciplinary area or more broadly.

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Concluding Remarks One of the main objectives of the survey presented in this chapter was to find out how the genre of academic presentations is treated in terms of general principles and how the notion of presentation effectiveness is viewed through the lens of Anglophone academic culture. It was also of interest to determine the extent to which there were some shared characteristics noted in the surveyed sources across area-unspecific materials, compared to discipline-specific manuals on academic presentations. One of the most important conclusions that emerged from the survey is the remarkable degree of consistency that exists with regard to the general principles underlying the genre of academic presentations in oral English academic discourse. Despite the differences in target readership and the broadly defined disciplinary areas, all surveyed sources presented a similar picture of general principles on which academic presentations should be built. This implies not only a sense of continuity between the sciences and the humanities, but also that the academic presentation as a genre (and, to some extent, as a register) is fairly well defined and provides a workable model for the broader community of both NESs and NNESs— novice students and professionals. Interestingly, both the general principles and the more specific characteristics of effective academic presentations had strong listener orientation—i.e. audience accommodation was highlighted as a guiding principle of presentation design and delivery across all surveyed sources. Respectively, audience accommodation was discussed at various levels—e.g., at the level of content selection, information structuring, organization, and delivery of the presentation itself. However, where most of the surveyed sources lacked was in the depth and breadth of their treatment of the language of academic presentations—it ranged from scant mention and examples to infrequent language discussions, focusing on consciously making language choices for audience accommodation purposes. With the exception of Reinhart (2002), for the most part, the language of presentations was glossed over in passing. Also, more often than not, the references to language-related choices were vague or unspecific, and, in that, they were left to the interpretation of the readers, assuming a relatively high and sophisticated degree of linguistic knowledge on their part. For example, Levin and Topping (2006) suggested “You can drop the formal language of ‘academicspeak’” or “Once you have redrafted your script to make it more conversational, more audience-friendly, read it aloud again …” (p. 88), and Engleberg and Daly (2005) advised “Don’t

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let long fancy words get in the way of your message” (p. 279), etc. Leaving the interpretation to the readers is not necessarily problematic as long as novice presenters are linguistically informed about, e.g., what language features are associated with formal or conversational usage or what the notion of “long and fancy words” refers to and why or how they may disrupt the clarity of a message to make a presentation audience-unfriendly. Assuming that novice presenters (be it students or professionals) are linguistically seasoned by virtue of being native speakers and educated adults is, in my view, only a partially tenable assumption because, as Pickering and Garrod (2004) have rightly pointed out, monologic speech “is very difficult, with successful communication often requiring very considerable planning. … Without training in monologue, people are very likely to go off track during comprehension and production. Even after these strategies have been developed, people still find monologue far more difficult than dialogue” (pp.  187–188). Along those lines, such training should necessarily include specific data-based language recommendations to ensure that the linguistic advice novice presenters receive, at minimum, reflects the main language trends of the sub-register as a whole. As a starting point in this regard, Chaps. 3 and 4 in this book will shed more light on two lexical aspects of the language of presentations—the use of single word vocabulary and collocational usage. The analyses are based on a corpus of real-life successful academic presentations, delivered by college students seeking advanced degrees in several areas of study (see Chap. 1 for a description of the SAP corpus) which will allow for a much needed evidence-driven discussion of the language of presentations, especially from a listener accommodation perspective.

References Anholt, R. R. H. (2006). Dazzle ’em with style: The art of oral scientific presentation (2nd ed.). London: Elsevier. Chivers, B., & Shoolbred, M. (2007). A student’s guide to presentations: Making your presentation count. London: Sage. Davis, M., Davis, K. J., & Dunagan, M. M. (2012). Scientific papers and presentations (3rd ed.). London: Elsevier. Engleberg, I., & Daly, J. (2005). Presentations in everyday life: Strategies for effective speaking. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company. Levin, P., & Topping, G. (2006). Perfect presentations! Student-friendly guides. New York: Open University Press.

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McCarthy, P., & Hatcher, C. (2002). Presentation skills: The essential guide for students. London: Sage. Patience, G.  S., Boffito, D.  C., & Patience, P.  A. (2015). Communicate science papers, presentations, and posters effectively: Papers, posters, and presentations. London: Elsevier. Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169–226. Platow, M.  J. (2002). Giving professional presentations in the behavioral sciences and related fields: A practical guide for the novice, the nervous, and the nonchalant. New York: Psychology Press. Reinhart, S. (2002). Giving academic presentations. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Schwabish, J. (2017). Better presentations: A guide for scholars, researchers, and wonks. New York: Columbia University Press. Simpson, R. C., Briggs, S. L., Ovens, J., & Swales, J. M. (2002). Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Retrieved from https://quod.lib.umich.edu/ cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple. Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zareva, A. (2009). Student academic presentations: The processing side of interactiveness. English Text Construction, 2(2), 265–288. Zareva, A. (2012). Lexical composition of effective L1 and L2 student academic presentations. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(1), 91–110.

CHAPTER 3

Lexical Profiles of Student Academic Presentations

Abstract  Some of the main functions of speech adjustment are to manage comprehension and accessibility of information in order to lighten listeners’ processing cognitive load. An observable aspect of this kind of accommodation behavior is reflected in the lexical choices speakers make—an aspect which has received relatively little attention in academic context, particularly with regard to student academic presentations. The chapter focuses on what is lexically “typical” of successful student presentations, the extent to which the lexical composition of presentations contributes to the formal or informal aspect of this oral academic sub-register, and how student presenters’ lexical choices possibly facilitate both the online production of speech and its online processing by the audience. Keywords  Student academic presentations • Productive vocabulary • Lexical profiles • Speech accommodation • Lexical alignment The lexical profiles of academic texts produced by both students and experts in speaking or writing have received well-deserved research attention in the last couple of decades. When NES texts are lexically profiled, the common goal of most studies seems to be to determine some sort of a baseline of lexical features in these texts (e.g., the proportion of the most frequently used English words compared to the proportion of more sophisticated vocabulary; the proportion of academic, specialized, and © The Author(s) 2020 A. Zareva, Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37980-3_3

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technical vocabulary; the lexical density and diversity of texts; etc.) against which NNES texts could be compared. Respectively, based on these comparisons, researchers could identify areas of overlaps and contrasts in the lexical profiles of these two groups of language users and discuss their findings in light of the teaching and learning implications they have for English as a subsequent language (ESL) students. Rarely have the lexical profiles of texts been connected to speakers’/writers’ attempts to accommodate not only themselves as producers of the discourse but also their listeners/readers as active decoders of this discourse. In this chapter, I will look into the lexical profiles of high-quality student academic presentations included in the SAP corpus (see a detailed description of the SAP corpus in Chap. 1) from a lexical accommodation perspective. This line of analysis can potentially uncover not only what is lexically “typical” of successful presentations but also how presenters’ lexical choices facilitate both the online production of speech and its online processing. The main goal of the analysis is to determine the lexical profiles of student presentations given the fact that all presenters face certain demanding tasks. On the one hand, they have to organize the informational content of their presentations to suit well the purposes of the communication, and, on the other, they need to reconcile two competing motivations in their language choices—the written sources used to shape their presentations’ informational content and the spoken mode of delivery of that content (Zareva 2012, 2019). Thus, to accomplish both tasks successfully, presenters have to carefully consider how each competing factor will influence their own delivery under the pressure of extemporaneous speaking and also find appropriate ways to facilitate listeners’ understanding of the dense and specialized content of their presentations. Based on my observations and previous research on student presentations, skillful and experienced presenters plan their presentations on many levels (e.g., informational, organizational, linguistic, presentational, etc.), which also includes planning of the lexis they are going to use. Surprisingly, none of the presenters, whose presentations form the SAP corpus, reported any previous instruction, suggestions, or recommendations in this regard. Equally surprisingly, the survey of the presentation sources, discussed in Chap. 2, revealed sporadic mention of lexical recommendations for novice presenters which, generally, leaves them with minimal guidance about this important linguistic aspect of the discourse. All this suggested a need for a lexical discussion on student presentations as an oral academic sub-register that has not been much researched in this regard.

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Lexical Profiling of Texts Lexical Layers in Texts For a long time, students’ writing has received much more research attention than their oral production (Read 2000; Szudarski 2018) probably because it is much easier and less time-consuming to compile a corpus of students’ data in writing than in speech. As a result, we have a good number of studies that have looked comparatively at a variety of lexical aspects of NESs and NNES students’ writing (e.g., Crossley and McNamara 2009; Laufer 1995; Laufer and Nation 1995; Morris and Cobb 2004) and fewer studies that have investigated students’ academic speech. Regardless of modality, though, the understanding that not all words are equally important in various contexts (Biber 2006; Nation 2001a) has always been at the heart of the lexical profiling of texts. From a usage point of view, the importance of different words has been traditionally determined by various measures such as word frequency, lexical coverage in different types of texts, proportion of different word categories (e.g., lexical vs. function words), distribution of vocabulary from different frequency bands, etc. It should be noted here that, in analyzing the lexical composition of texts, one useful distinction pointed out by Meara and Bell (2001) is the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic measures. Intrinsic measures provide lexical information solely with respect to the words that appear in a given text as used by its author/s. Examples of intrinsic measures are, for instance, the various measures associated with lexical diversity (e.g., type-token ratio, vocd, MTLD) or the measure of lexical density (usually calculated as the proportion of content words to the total number of words in a text). Extrinsic measures, on the other hand, supplement the intrinsic ones by evaluating the lexical composition of texts against frequency data that are external to the text itself (e.g., word lists, corpora, etc.). The benefit of using both intrinsic and extrinsic measures in the lexical profiling of texts is that we can uncover relationships between their internal lexical composition and the larger world of language usage in terms of patterns that may be typical of a specific text variety. Frequency is probably the most powerful characteristic of words, and, in that, it has had significant impact on research in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, teaching, material design, textbook writing, and many other areas of language use. From a cognitive point of view, the reasons for considering frequency as an impactful factor are pretty straightforward: In

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a great number of studies, frequency has shown to be a significant influence in visual and auditory perception as well as memory for linguistic material (Nusbaum et  al. 1984). In general, more frequent words are recalled better, responded faster and more accurately than lower frequency words, which confirms that word frequency affects the speed and accuracy of lexical decisions both in production and perception of vocabulary. Thus, the assumption that there is a relationship between frequency lists, compiled based on large corpora, and familiarity with the words in those lists is largely based on the expectation that the lists mirror the way speakers/writers or listeners/readers experience lexical frequency in natural language. Respectively, dividing vocabulary into categories (e.g., high, mid, low frequency words) based on their frequency of occurrence in natural language is a useful way of connecting the likelihood of different words to appear recurrently in a variety of texts and their importance in a wide range of contexts. By and large, there seems to be a general consensus among researchers that the core English vocabulary consists of the first 2000 most frequent words in the English language (Nation 2001b, 2016; O’Keeffe et  al. 2007). Those words are most commonly associated with West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) of the 2000 most frequent words, identified from a 5-million-word corpus of written texts. As Nation (2001a) has rightly pointed out, the dividing line between high frequency and low frequency words is arbitrary, but it is usually set at 2000 words primarily based on their coverage across a variety of texts. For instance, the most common 2000 words account for 80% or more of the words in various texts in speech and writing (Nation 2001a, b; Szudarski 2018; Zareva 2012, 2019), and the coverage of vocabulary beyond that frequency drops substantially (Nation 2001a; Zareva 2012, 2019). Beyond the high frequency vocabulary, there are a couple of other lexical layers that are of great importance in academic context because, even though their share is much smaller, they allow students to put their academic knowledge on display in a discipline-specific and academically appropriate way (Nation 2001b). These additional layers include academic vocabulary (i.e., lexis commonly used across various academic disciplines) as well as specialized, technical, and lower frequency vocabulary associated with specific disciplinary and professional knowledge. Two of the most popular lists developed specifically for academic purposes are Xue and Nation’s (1984) University Word List (UWL) and Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) both of which were compiled with ESL ­learning in

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mind; nonetheless, both of them are valuable external sources for evaluation of the academic vocabulary content of written and oral texts produced for academic purposes. The UWL includes 836 word families beyond the GSL common in written academic texts, while the AWL contains a smaller number of word families (570 academic word families) used widely across different disciplines without being technical or field specific (details about how the AWL was developed can be found in Coxhead 2000 and 2011). Rather, these are words beyond the 2000 most common words in the GSL that comprise approximately 10% of academic texts written by experts, but occur less frequently in newspaper articles (about 4.5%) and fiction texts (approximately 1.4%) (Coxhead 2011). Finally, the use of technical or specialized vocabulary is linked to specific disciplines, areas of study, or professional contexts. In that sense, it plays an important role in those areas and offers conceptual shortcuts in specialized discourse, especially when interlocutors share common disciplinary or occupational knowledge. This lexical layer is central to lexical accommodation because, on the one hand, it allows the use of the same kind of specialized vocabulary that all members of a given discourse community share. On the other hand, it becomes essentially important to pay attention to from lexical adjustment point of view in contexts where the discourse includes a mixed audience of listeners/readers, who also need to be accommodated but in a different way. Knowledge of specialized and technical vocabulary comes with a good number of benefits in academic contexts as it not only helps language users engage and participate more fully in specialized discourse, but also enables them to claim a disciplinary “insider” status and display a new sense of identity. The percentage of technical vocabulary in different specialized areas varies across the disciplines, ranging from about 3% to over 20% (for an excellent review of the research on specialized vocabulary, see Coxhead 2018). It should be noted here that the academic, lower frequency, and specialized vocabulary are very closely intertwined, so one of the challenges in the identification of technical and specialized vocabulary is where to draw the line between these three categories (Coxhead 2018). Determining the Lexical Complexity of Texts In addition to identifying the lexical composition of texts (e.g., the proportion of the core 2000 words, lower frequency, academic, specialized, and technical vocabulary), part of their lexical profiling should also include

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an analysis of their lexical complexity. The idea behind lexical complexity is that basic and sophisticated words contribute differently to texts, which makes the notion of complexity useful for a variety of reasons (e.g., teaching, learning, material design, lexical accommodation recommendations, etc.). To avoid some of the ambiguities associated with the term “lexical richness,” which is often used with various meanings in the literature, I will use the notion of lexical complexity in this chapter as operationalized by Bulté and Housen (2012). In many ways, this notion is similar to Read’s (2000) understanding of lexical richness, though Bulté and Housen (2012) view it on a broader scale as part of a framework of language complexity in general. In their discussion, they rightly point out that any analysis of complexity should specify what is meant by “complex”; how “complexity” can be operationalized, measured, and evaluated; and how we can distinguish between simple and complex language features. Bulté and Housen’s (2012) lexical complexity framework includes four subcomponents: lexical density, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and compositionality of words (morpheme and syllable structure). In this study, only the first three subcomponents will be used to analyze the lexical complexity of the student academic presentations since the data were collected from adult NES college students. The fourth subcomponent (word compositionality) is, perhaps, useful for evaluating texts produced by young children and ESL learners of lower proficiency, but not so much for evaluating the lexical complexity of linguistically proficient native speakers. To measure each of the subcomponents, Bulté and Housen (2012) proposed various measures which they identified from a review of the literature on lexical research. Some of these measures are more stable and reliable for different text lengths than others, so for the purposes of this study, I will discuss only the ones that will be used in the present analyses as they work well with longer texts of unequal sizes  (i.e., texts with a word count between 1000 and 2000+ words). Lexical density is commonly defined as the ratio of content words (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) to the total number of words in a text. The idea that such a ratio is an indicator of lexical density is based on the assumption that a message containing more complex information requires the use of more content vocabulary than function words (e.g., pronouns, articles, particles, auxiliary verbs, etc.). The notion of lexical density was first introduced by Ure (1971) and its usefulness was confirmed by her findings that conversations, for instance, have a much lower lexical density (a ratio of 0.24 to 0.35 of content words) than written texts

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(approximately 0.36 to 0.57). These findings prompted further research into the lexical density of texts from different genres and registers produced by both students and expert writers; however, the lexical density of orally produced academic texts (including academic presentations) has been less well researched. The second subcomponent in Bulté and Housen’s (2012) lexical complexity framework, lexical sophistication, is sometimes referred to as “lexical rarity” because it is measured by the proportion of lower frequency vocabulary to the total number of words in texts. This means that the chunk of vocabulary associated with the lexical sophistication of texts, particularly texts produced in academic contexts, will consist of words beyond the 2000 most common words and will include vocabulary such as academic, technical, subject-specific, jargon, and other less common lower frequency vocabulary that may be related to a specific discipline, genre, or topic. Research to date has consistently confirmed that the increased use of academic, specialized, or technical vocabulary—i.e. categories associated with the lexical sophistication of texts—is what sets the academic register apart from the less formal ones. The third subcomponent of lexical complexity, lexical diversity (sometimes also called “lexical variability”), is associated with the use of different words compared to a limited number of words used repetitively. In other words, it reflects the variety of active vocabulary that speakers/writers choose to use as opposed to the vocabulary they have available to them but do not use (Malvern et  al. 2004; McCarthy and Jarvis 2007). This dimension has been commonly found to be associated with speakers’/ writers’ heightened language competence and accommodation adjustments that show audience awareness, writing quality, and overall well-­ developed lexical competence. This is one of the reasons why lexical diversity has been unanimously recognized as an important aspect of the lexical complexity of texts. The greatest concern about this subcomponent is primarily related to the question of how to measure it reliably when texts of different length are analyzed. The simplest measure, which has been widely used in lexical research for a long time, is the type-token ratio (TTR)—i.e. the ratio of the number of different words (word types) to the total number of words (word tokens) in a given text. However, this measure and its various transformations (e.g., mean segmental TTR, corrected TTR, root TTR, etc.) have been rightfully criticized on the grounds of their sensitivity to text length. The TTR, for instance, tends to decrease as the size of a text

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increases because the longer the text, the less varied vocabulary speakers/ writers use (Malvern et al. 2004; McCarthy and Jarvis 2007; Read 2000; Treffers-Daller et  al. 2016). To avoid the pitfalls of TTR (for instance, discarding data to standardize samples of different length to an equal size), several other measures have been proposed in recent years. Some of those measures are the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD) (McCarthy 2005), vocd, Maas, K, and HD-D (see Malvern et al. 2004; McCarthy and Jarvis 2010; Treffers-Daller et al. 2016 for detailed discussions on the lexical diversity measures), which are reliable indexes of lexical diversity over samples of different length and text homogeneity.

Research on the Lexical Profiles of Student Academic Presentations As mentioned earlier, there is a small number of studies that have been done on the lexical profiles of student academic presentations, which makes it difficult to determine what can be considered “typical” of the sub-register. These studies share some similarities in the reported lexical profile aspects, but they also differ in their methodologies in some important ways which, consequently, influences the comparability of their results across certain variables. Table  3.1 presents a summary of the published research on the lexical profiles of NES academic presentations (even though the studies also included NNES texts). Overall, the results reveal that the majority of the vocabulary in NES presentations comes from the first 2000 most frequent words in English (i.e., over 80%) which confirms that the high frequency words in the 1 K and 2 K ranges provide the greatest word coverage of texts (Laufer and Nation 1995; Morris and Cobb 2004; Nation 2001b; Treffers-Daller et al. 2016; Zareva 2012). However, mastering the remaining 11–16% of the lower frequency words, including academic, specialized, and technical vocabulary becomes a prerequisite for academic success of both NES and NNES students as disciplinary professionalization puts high demands for precision, academic appropriateness, and disciplinary relevance on college level students (Zareva 2012). Looking at the lexical complexity of the presentations, it  generally shows some variation across the subcategories—for instance,  some of them bring the sub-register closer to written academic discourse while others reveal more similarities with the lexical complexity of informal

NES participants

%1 K words

0.49

0.50

0.49

82.29

83.65

–

5.98

7.87

5.80

5.84

8.48 (off-list words)

5.63

% % lower AWL frequency, technical, and specialized words

Lexical complexity

%2 K Total Lexical words %1 K + %2 K density

Core vocabulary

NES senior 79.13 3.16 undergraduate and novice graduate students (n = 30) Kao and John Swales 79.5 4.13 Wang Conference Corpus of (2014) presenters (corpus size about 100,000 words) Zareva NES senior – – (2019) undergraduate and first year graduate students (n = 31)

Zareva (2012)

Study

506

752

507

Different words (number)

Table 3.1  Summary of research on the lexical profiles of NESs’ academic presentations

36.9

–

37

MTLD index

–

(Included in the off-list)

5.65

Oral discourse words and disfluencies

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speech. For example, the lexical density of the presentations (ranging from 0.43 to 0.50) puts them closer to written narrative and expository texts rather than to spoken monologues, which suggests that the content sources and, perhaps, the subject matter of these presentations exercise a stronger influence on the need for lexical density than the oral mode of delivery does. The range of lexical sophistication values, associated with presenters’ use of AWL vocabulary and lower frequency, specialized, and technical vocabulary, varies from 11.4% to 16.3%, which demonstrates a pattern of lexical sophistication in-between  oral discourse and written prose. As far as the lexical diversity of presentations is concerned, the few results that are available (i.e., Zareva 2012, 2019) suggest that student presenters do not seem to strive for lexical diversity in the delivery of their presentations—the MTLD values are low (on average, it takes about 37 words to reach a point of text stabilization) and lexical repetition is a common strategy among student presenters (on average, presenters use between 506 and 752 different words which they repeat on average about 4 times in their presentations). Finally, the presence of disfluencies and fillers (about 5.6%) is an aspect that should also be accounted for in the lexical profiles of presentations because, even though they do not contribute to the informational content, they are a noticeable feature of presentations. The brief overview of the scant research on the lexical profiles of student presentations above reveals not only how little work has been done on the genre/sub-register but also the need for determining what patterns of words are associated with this text variety and what their functions are from a speech accommodation point of view. The analysis of the SAP corpus, presented in the rest of the chapter, will aim to address these questions.

Lexical Profile Measures Used in the Analysis of the SAP Corpus The lexical profile analysis of the SAP corpus was conducted with three goals in mind: First, to determine the lexical profiles of successful NES student academic presentations, hence, what can be considered lexically “typical” of such presentations along the different lexical profile categories. Second, to determine guiding baselines of several single word measures  associated with the lexical profiles of texts from the sub-register of student academic

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presentations, which can be useful for research, teaching, and material design purposes. Third, to find out more about the ­relationship between all measures used in the lexical profiling of the presentations and identify the ones that can be connected to presenters’ speech accommodation attempts. This line of analysis will not only have implications for the way the lexical aspect of this academic genre is addressed in communication classes, but will also reveal the relationship between some lexical accommodation strategies presenters can use to lighten their listeners’ processing burden while remaining relevant to the purposes of the specialized discourse. The following measures were used to profile the lexical composition of the presentations at a single word level: A. Core vocabulary was measured by:



1. Percentage of the first 1000 (1  K) most frequent words in English, including content words (e.g., groups, shape, go, wealth, social, separately) and function words (e.g., how, if, it, but, into, or, which, why) 2. Percentage of the second 1000 (2  K) most commonly used words (e.g., afraid, behavior, explore, guess, model, perform, universal) B. Lexical complexity of the presentations was captured by different measures typically associated with three of its subcomponents:

1. Lexical density (determined by the ratio of content words to the total number of words in each presentation) 2. Lexical sophistication, evaluated by:

(a) the percentage of different words (types) from the AWL (e.g., acquisition, comprehensive, negative, processes, status, variables) (b) the percentage of different lower frequency, technical, and specialized vocabulary (word types) beyond the 2  K and AWL, which included several subcategories: • lower frequency vocabulary (e.g., condescending, demeaning, misogynistic, objectifying, superficiality, racist)

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• discipline-specific/technical vocabulary (e.g., attitudinal, competencies, extrinsic, linguistic, innate, pedagogy, stance, vernacular, dyslexia, syntactically) • names of countries, areas, institutions, languages, programs, and scholars (e.g., Broca, Laufer, Wernicke, Swiss, Tidewater, Ukraine, Urdu, YouTube, SPSS) • acronyms (e.g., L1, L2, TOEFL, ESL) • abbreviations and slang words (e.g., et  al., vocab, lab, exam, prep, math) • foreign or other words used in examples (e.g., Ich, hablar, kolelo, knuckleheads) • IPA symbols and transcribed words, given as examples 3. Lexical diversity, evaluated by:

(a) the number of different words (word types) used by the presenters (b) the MTLD index (i.e., the range and diversity of vocabulary in each presentation) C. Oral discourse disfluencies and other vocabulary—i.e. words that typically occur in speech but are unlikely to occur in writing. These included several subcategories, calculated as a percentage of disfluency types (i.e., different disfluencies, excluding the repetitions): • word fragments—i.e. truncated words (e.g., attit- (for attitude), singu- (for singular), stra- (for strategy) • vocatives (e.g., guys, man) • mispronunciations (e.g., brung (for brought)) • lexicalized phonological reductions (e.g., cuz, gonna, gotta, wanna, kinda, sorta, dunno) • inserts (e.g., alright, yep, okay, duh, oops, blah, wow, yeah, whoa) • fillers (e.g., um, ts, er, uh, ah, ugh, like)

The lexical profiles of the presentations were determined by running each presentation through a program called VocabProfile (Classic version) (Cobb 2002). The program is available on Tom Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor (v.8.3) and can be accessed via this link: https://www.lextutor.ca/ vp/comp/. It is described in detail in Nation (2001a), but, in brief, it

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compares a text against vocabulary lists (GSL and AWL) and classifies the words used in it into four categories: 1 K, 2 K (based on West’s GSL), academic words (based on Coxhead’s AWL), and the last category contains words not found in the other lists, which are  classified as off-list words. The output of the analysis provided by the VocabProfiler shows these categories in terms of frequency (both on a count of types and tokens) and the percentage of each category represented in the text. There are also some other useful measures that the program provides (e.g., the lexical density of texts) which were used in the profiles of the presentations in the SAP corpus. For the purposes of our analysis, some of the measures were taken as calculated by the VocabProfiler—more specifically, the core vocabulary measures (1 K and 2 K words) and some of the lexical complexity measures (i.e., lexical density, percentage of word types from the AWL, and number of different words). Some of the remaining ones had to be recalculated, based on the specifications for those measures described earlier. Those included (1) the percentage of lower frequency, technical, and specialized vocabulary beyond the 2 K words and AWL (in word types) and (2) the words related to oral discourse that would typically not occur in writing. The MTLD index, chosen to evaluate the lexical diversity of the presentations, was obtained by running the presentations through a program, developed by McCarthy (2005). The choice of this measure was based on empirical evidence that (1) it is stable with longer texts (in the range of 1000  –  2000+ words); (2) it fully preserves text integrity—i.e. no text needs to be discarded in order to standardize text samples to a specific length; and (3) it takes into account text homogeneity in the assessment of lexical diversity—i.e. it accounts for the fact that the number of different words decreases as texts reach thematic saturation beyond which no new words need to be introduced.

Lexical Profiles of the Presentations in the SAP Corpus On average, the lexical profiles of the presentations in the SAP corpus revealed the following distribution across the different categories (see Table 3.2): The first goal of the analysis was to determine the lexical profiles of successful presentations delivered by NES higher-level college students and

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Table 3.2  Lexical profiles of the SAP corpus texts (n = 50) Lexical profile measures

Means

Core vocabulary  • % 1 K words (types)  • % 2 K words (types) Lexical complexity  • Lexical density (content/total number of words)  • % academic word list vocabulary (types)  • % lower frequency, technical, and specialized content vocabulary (types)  • Number of different words (types)  • Lexical diversity (MTLD) Different (types) oral discourse items and disfluencies (e.g., fillers, inserts, vocatives, etc.)

SD

67.29% 3.65% 7.33% 1.25% 0.49 0.04 12.48% 2.91% 10.35% 3.21% 510 63.56 2.4%

75 10.78 1.09

find out what is lexically “typical” of such presentations at a single word level. The practical significance of this line of analysis was twofold: First, to identify the average distribution of eight measures, associated with three main aspects of the lexical composition of presentations—i.e. the use of core vocabulary, the lexical complexity of the presentations, and the percentage of oral discourse words and disfluencies. Second, to determine some baselines for the measures that can serve not only as guiding baselines for future research into this sub-register, but can also aid teaching, assessment, English for academic purposes (EAP) material design, and oral communication textbook writing. An additional focus in the discussion of the findings will be the interpretation of different lexical profile categories in light of speech accommodation strategies the presenters used in making lexical choices to adjust to their listeners’ processing and comprehension needs. Such a discussion will inevitably link the findings of the current analysis to the comparisons between the lexical profiles of academic speech and writing since the purpose of audience accommodation in each modality is distinct and different. In what follows, each of the lexical profile subcategories will be discussed briefly. Core Vocabulary Not surprisingly, the first 2000 most common words in English (based on West’s GSL) accounted for the largest percentage of word types used by the presenters, with the first 1000 most frequent words having the largest

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share of core vocabulary. This massive coverage that the core vocabulary provides across various registers, genres, and modalities has been consistently confirmed by many lexical studies carried out on spoken and written texts. For instance, Nation (2001b) estimated that the core vocabulary provides coverage of about 90% of the vocabulary in conversation, 87% in fiction, 80% in newspaper, and 78% in written academic texts. In the current study, about 75% (67.3% 1 K + 7.3% 2 K) of the lexical composition of the presentations consisted of high frequency words, a percentage which is slightly lower than the one reported by Nation (2001b) for written academic texts (78%), yet high enough to support the important role these words play in language use in general. Overall, the proportion of high frequency core vocabulary puts the subregister of student presentations close to written academic prose which suggests that it plays as important a role in this sub-register as it does in writing. Lexical Complexity The first subcomponent of lexical complexity—lexical density—revealed that, on average, the content words accounted for 49% of the vocabulary the presenters used. This value is similar to the values reported in other studies (see Table 3.1) and suggests that the lexical density of the presentations places this sub-register alongside the lexical density found in writing, especially in narrative and expository writing, rather than next to that of spoken discourse (Morris and Cobb 2004; Ure 1971; Zareva 2019). The similarity in lexical density of the presentations with written texts can be attributed to several situational characteristics. For instance, unlike spontaneous speech, (1) the academic presentation is a prepared discourse which means that the presenters most likely revised their presentations multiple times during the preparation stage to make adjustments at several levels  (including their lexical choices) in addition to rehearsing them beforehand; (2) the presentational content is largely derived from written academic texts which the presenters have read, analyzed, synthesized, and incorporated into their presentations; and (3) the presentation is a monologic speech act—i.e. there is no verbal response to other speakers which certainly strongly influences its lexical density (Ure 1971). Overall, the lexical density of the presentations in the SAP corpus reveals that skillful student presenters are aware that their area-specific presentations should

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be dense in content vocabulary that not only captures the informational content of their topics, but also conveys complex disciplinary knowledge. The second subcomponent of lexical complexity—lexical sophistication—was evaluated by two measures: the percentage of different AWL words (i.e., word types) and the percentage of different low frequency, technical, and specialized content vocabulary (in word types) used in the presentations. On average, the presenters’ use of different AWL words accounted for 12.5% of all different words in the presentations in addition to another 10.4% of lower frequency, technical, and specialized vocabulary. These percentages do not include repetitions and reveal that what is considered sophisticated vocabulary use (i.e., the use of academic and lower frequency, technical, and specialized vocabulary) altogether accounts for about 23% of the use of different words in successful student presentations. This is a substantial chunk of vocabulary that student presenters need to master and use appropriately to be able to display their subject-­ area knowledge, convey the complexities of their topic content, and meet the expectations of their discourse community. Overall, this percentage is higher than the ones reported in the few other studies on the lexical profiles of NES student presentations (see Table 3.1) which may be a result of many factors (e.g., operationalization of the notion of sophisticated vocabulary, reporting methodology [tokens vs. types], differences in students’ educational level [undergraduate vs. graduate students or a mix of both], disciplinary areas, presentational proficiency, sample size, etc.). The multitude of factors that can potentially influence the proportion of sophisticated vocabulary used in this sub-­ register comes to suggest that, for comparison purposes, a good number of situational characteristics should be controlled for before we can reliably compare results across studies. Equally importantly, more studies are needed on this sub-register, especially across different disciplinary areas, to determine if there is lexical variability associated with different specialized academic uses or whether the percentage of this vocabulary is consistent regardless of discipline. For now, we can only say that the proportion of sophisticated vocabulary reported here can be considered typical of student presentations that share similar situational characteristics with the ones that describe the SAP corpus. This heightened percentage not only sets academic discourse (both spoken and written) apart from the other less formal registers, but also reveals that the spoken mode of delivery did not seem to impact the choice of sophisticated vocabulary as much as it influences other linguistic and rhetorical features. Along those lines, the

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total percentage of sophisticated vocabulary that Nation (2001b) reported for written academic prose (8.5% of AWL  +  13.3% of lower frequency, technical, and discipline-specific vocabulary) is close to the percentage found in this analysis which implies a similarity between the oral and written modalities of text production in academic context. Finally, the third aspect of lexical complexity—lexical diversity—was evaluated by two measures as well—i.e. the number of different words and the MTLD index. Perhaps, the number of different words used in a text is the simplest way of measuring lexical diversity where the  assumption is that the more different words there are in a text, the more diverse it is. Even though the presentations were on average about 2000 words long (M  =  2052, SD  =  400), which includes repetitions, filler words, hesitations, etc., the number of different words the presenters used was much lower. On average, a presenter used 510 different words of which about 75% were high frequency vocabulary, 23% sophisticated vocabulary, and 2% lexical disfluencies. What this measure fails to account for, though, is that different parts of a text have different rhetorical purposes, which may not require the introduction of new vocabulary. For instance, in the context of academic presentations, we can reasonably expect that the introduction to the topic of a presentation would be more lexically diverse than the conclusion; and the main body of the presentation would be more lexically diverse than the introduction or the conclusion. For that reason, a second measure was used to evaluate the texts in the SAP corpus sequentially and determine their lexical diversity index—the MTLD index. The MTLD index is calculated as the mean length of sequential strings of words in a text that maintain a 0.720 TTR value. This value was selected based on evidence from the testing of various narratives and expository texts which showed stable TTR trajectories at around 0.720 (+/− 0.03) (McCarthy and Jarvis 2010). As mentioned earlier, the assumption behind the MTLD index is that the fewer words it takes to get to the point of lexical saturation, the less diverse a text can be considered and vice versa. The analysis of the MTLD index of the presentations in this study revealed that it took on average about 64 words to reach the point of text stabilization, which is higher than Zareva’s (2012) and Zareva’s (2019) findings (mean MTLD = 37) for her NES participants. Beyond this general conclusion, however, the results are difficult to interpret in terms of whether the MTLD scores show that the language used by the presenters is lexically diverse or not in comparison to other written and oral registers. Based on the results of the few studies on student presentations that

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have employed the MTLD score as a measure of lexical diversity, all we can conclude is that, on average, it ranges between 37 and 64 and, in that, it is lower than the values found for written texts. In a nutshell, the two measures of lexical diversity used in this study (i.e., number of different words and the MTLD index) revealed the same trends that Zareva (2012) and Zareva (2019) found in other studies with different data sets. In other words, student presenters do not seem to be striving for lexical diversity in the delivery of their presentations. Rather, recycling the same vocabulary relatively frequently (about four times per presentation) and introducing new words at a relatively low rate seem to serve the purpose of getting the presentations’ content points across sufficiently well. Oral Discourse Items and Disfluencies The final aspect of the lexical profiles of the presentations accounted for in this analysis is related to word items that typically occur in speech but are unlikely to occur in writing such as word fragments (e.g., singu- (for singular), vocatives (e.g., guys), inserts (e.g., nope, yep, okay), filler words (e.g., um, ugh, like), and others. This is the lexical layer that particularly distinguishes the academic presentation from written academic prose even though, like most of written academic prose, student presentations are prepared, revised, and usually a rehearsed type of discourse. On average, the disfluencies accounted for 2.4% of the different words (types) used in the presentations in the SAP corpus (in the range of 1.2% to 5.9%) which shows that all presenters experienced some difficulties in delivering fluently their otherwise planned discourse (some more than others) which may be a result of public speaking anxiety, lack of proper rehearsal, or other pressures that come with face-to-face delivery of informationally dense content. By and large, the presence of disfluencies is usually treated in the literature as an indicator of production difficulty (e.g., Arnold et al. 2000; Biber et al. 1999; Clark 1994), and, respectively, a lower rate of such disfluencies is usually discussed as evidence of planning in spoken discourse (Clark and Wasow 1998). In other words, the assumption is that, when presenters may not be able to meet the goal of fluent speech delivery, they tend to resort to a variety of disfluencies to stall for time and/or repair their production (Arnold et al. 2000). From a speaker point of view, this assumption can largely explain the truncated words, the mispronunciations, the use of fillers and hesitation markers that every presenter resorted to in the

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course of their presentation delivery. However, if we take the listener point of view, some of the conversational uses and disfluencies can be interpreted as presenters’ attempts to accommodate their audience by bringing some interactive and more conversational lexical features in their presentations—e.g., some lexicalized reductions (e.g., gonna, wanna, ­ sorta, etc.), inserts (e.g., like, okay), filler words (e.g., um, er), vocatives (e.g., guys), etc. In any event, it would be safe to say that some of these more economical and conversational lexical uses helped create an atmosphere of cooperative interaction and consensus between student presenters and their audience of peers for the purpose of information negotiation (Webber 2005).

Lexical Convergence in Student Academic Presentations As explained in Chap. 1, Communication Accommodation Theory (e.g., Giles 1984; Giles and Smith 1979) rests on an observable feature of human behavior—that, much like with other animals, it is largely coordinated (Giles 2016; Niederhoffer and Pennebaker 2002). In other words, participants in linguistic interactions tend to adjust aspects of their verbal and non-verbal behavior to their listeners for various reasons such as establishing common ground for a coherent interaction to take place, managing the social relationships between the participants in the interaction, making sure that the conveyed content of the message is accessible to the audience, facilitating the comprehension and communication effectiveness of the interaction, etc. (Gasiorek 2016). Some psycholinguistic models of language processing, especially the ones concerning dialogic speech, make a distinction between coordination in an interaction and linguistic alignment, in which the former refers to coordination of participants that occurs in any joint activity and the latter refers to convergence on linguistic behavior that occurs when both speakers and listeners share same mental representations (e.g., Branigan et al. 2010, 2011; Pickering and Garrod 2004). For example, two interactants would be aligned on the use of the term codeswitching if they called the same phenomenon codeswitching (e.g., using words from two different languages in one sentence) even if one or both of them never actually utters the term. However, they will not be aligned if one refers to the phenomenon as codeswitching and the other one calls it codemixing. In academic contexts, where terminological

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­ recision is much more heightened than in other registers (e.g., conversap tion, fiction, magazine writing) and few terms can be used interchangeably, it becomes particularly important for presenters and their audience to be lexically aligned to avoid, at the very least, creating ambiguity or misunderstanding in the interaction. To my knowledge, the lexical profiles of student presentations have not been discussed in light of the notion of lexical alignment (sometimes also called lexical entrainment), perhaps, because the idea of alignment has been mostly researched in dialogic rather than monologic speech. Along similar lines, Pickering and Garrod (2004) noted that the interactive alignment model was primarily developed to account for tightly coupled processing of face-to-face spontaneous conversations rather than for monologues. However, they further pointed out that this model can also be applied to monologues as a special case since there does not seem to be a clear-cut distinction between dialogue and monologue. Rather, the distinction between them falls on a range along a dialogic continuum. I should note here that the current discussion about the lexical alignment of student presentations will be largely speculative because the study presented above was not specifically designed to examine linguistic alignment effects. Nonetheless, I believe that applying this lens to the lexical composition of presentations is useful in practical terms because, on the one hand, it underscores the interactive nature of presentations where alignment is desired much like in dialogues and, on the other, it highlights a possible relationship between the lexical profiles of presentations and presenters’ attempts to lexically align with their audience in light of the situational characteristics of the sub-register itself. As the analysis of the lexical layers of the presentations revealed, the core vocabulary or the first 2000 most common words in English accounted for the largest percentage of different words used by presenters (approx. 75%), with the first 1000 most frequent words having the largest share (approx. 67%). This massive coverage of the high frequency vocabulary supports the universally agreed-upon phenomenon of word frequency effects in lexical research and experimental psychology (among other areas). It rests on the fundamental finding that high frequency words are produced and understood faster than less frequent ones, and, respectively, because these words are used repetitively in many contexts, their faster processing is affected by the repetition. In that sense, it can be confidently said that the high percentage of high frequency vocabulary is motivated by the high functionality of this vocabulary. For example, the majority of the

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words that belong to the high frequency bands have multiple meanings, which greatly broadens their scope of usage in a variety of contexts. Thus, because of their high frequency, speakers/writers use them flexibly and effortlessly regardless of the pressures of various contexts of language production. For the same reasons, listeners/readers can decode and process them faster and easier than lower frequency vocabulary. Given that the percentage of high frequency vocabulary in the presentations was similar to the percentage found in written academic prose, it seems that this lexical layer is largely unaffected by mode of production in academic context (academic speech vs. writing). In that sense, the use of the 2000 most frequent words in the English language does not seem to be affected by extralinguistic information, and their priming is most probably not mediated by presenters’ beliefs about their listeners. To use Branigan et al.’s (2010) terminology, alignment with regard to this lexical layer probably occurs as an unmediated mechanism. From speakers’ point of view, this is the mechanism that offers the most cognitive economy because presenters do not need to model their audience. From listeners’ perspective, by virtue of being very frequent, the core vocabulary becomes “central to comprehension of monologues because it is what people fall back on if they have no strong context” (Pickering and Garrod 2004, p. 184). It is possible, though, that we may observe some variation if the context changes— for instance, if we compare student presentations with expert presentations given at professional conferences or if we compare these two sub-registers with lectures given to a specialized or general audience. In any event, for teaching and language learning purposes, it is practically useful to be aware of the massive prevalence of the core vocabulary in academic discourse regardless of whether it is produced in speech or writing. This, however, does not signal conscious awareness of lexical alignment on the part of presenters. The second largest lexical layer in students’ presentations—the one associated with lexical complexity—seems to be more interesting in terms of alignment. As noted earlier, the core vocabulary does not provide evidence for mediated lexical alignment, suggesting that both presenters and listeners are probably entirely unaware that alignment has taken place at that level of lexical use. However, when it comes to the lexical complexity of the presentations, I would argue that lexical alignment is motivated by the combined effect of the other two mechanisms of alignment, discussed by Branigan et al. (2010)—i.e. alignment as audience design and alignment for social affect. In brief, as Branigan et  al. (2010) explained, the

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alignment based on audience design is mediated by speakers’ beliefs about what linguistic choices (in this case, lexical choices) will enhance the communicative success of an interaction in the process of audience design (Bell 1984). For instance, in their assessment of what their listeners are likely to know, speakers make use of evidence about their cultural communities as well as their own personal experiences. That is, if speakers believe that their listeners have access to certain specialized knowledge by virtue of their membership in a certain discourse community, they may use terminology, specialized vocabulary, etc. to refer to various notions without additional explanation. In contrast, if speakers believe that their listeners do not have access to specialized knowledge, they may tend to use more descriptive language to refer to the same notions. From a personal point of view, speakers may also form certain beliefs about common experiences they share with their listeners or may use repetitively certain language which appeared to have been understood. In addition to alignment motivated by audience assessment, the repeated use of linguistic expressions might also serve the purpose of establishing a social relationship of solidarity among participants in an interaction, in which case we will observe alignment for social affect. For example, speakers might repeat language previously used by other participants in the interaction in order to evoke more positive feelings or as an expression of affiliation with them, which will signal attempts to align with their listeners for social reasons. Keeping in mind that academic presentations are a planned, prepared, and (most of the times) rehearsed discourse, it would be logical to assume that many of the presenters’ lexical choices are a result of their conscious awareness of the necessity to model their audience and consider its needs and expectations. Moreover, as noted in the description of the situational characteristics of  the SAP corpus (see Chap. 1), when students  are not presenting, they become members of the primary audience of listeners of other students’ presentations. Thus, by experiencing both roles of presenter and listener, they become aware of the extent to which they share not only common educational background, interests, and specialized knowledge with their peers but also the nature of their social relationship. In that sense, several aspects of the lexical complexity of the presentations, namely, the use of academic, specialized, lower frequency, and technical vocabulary as well as the lexical diversity of the texts, can be linked to presenters’ attempts to align with their audience both in terms of expectations and community membership as well as socially.

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The presenters used about 12.5% academic vocabulary from the AWL (which list contains a relatively small number of words that are necessarily used repetitively) and another 10.4% of other lower frequency, technical, and specialized content words (see Table  3.2) of which 23% (n  =  336 ­lemmas) were words used repeatedly by, at least, two different presenters and 77% (n = 1113 lemmas) were used by single presenters, oftentimes repeatedly. Altogether, this implies that the presenters had probably evaluated their audience beforehand and (arguably) chose to use lexically complex vocabulary that matched not only the content of their presentations but also (at least, partly) the common conceptual background they believed they shared with their listeners. These choices can also be speculated to be audience specific in that the presenters repeatedly employed shared academic and specialized vocabulary as conceptual shortcuts to aid their own online production and, perhaps, their audience’s comprehension. At the same time, it is very likely that the audience members also expected the use of the same representationally shared academic and specialized terminology as cognitive shortcuts which aid their own online understanding of the presentations’ content. As far as the lexical diversity of the presentations is concerned, repetition of the same vocabulary generally lowers the lexical diversity of texts. The rate of repetition observed in the presentations seems to support findings from other studies on the perception of downward lexical diversity convergence (i.e., decrease of lexical diversity) as a speech accommodation strategy that promotes positive communicator outcomes (e.g., Bradac et al. 1988) and a perception of speakers as being competent and knowledgeable. It should be noted here that, based on the design of this study, there is not sufficient evidence about the direction of the diversity convergence (i.e., whether it is upward or downward); however, a comparison between the lexical diversity, for instance, of student presentations and academic papers written by the presenters on the same topics as their presentations will more clearly reveal not only the direction but also the rate of convergence. At this point, it would be safe to say that the generally lower level of lexical diversity, compared to writing, indicated by the rate of word repetition in the presentations and the  relatively low MTLD scores, implies downward lexical diversity convergence. Interestingly, this kind of convergence has been found to be viewed positively as a sign of speakers having flexible control over this lexical feature of their language production (e.g., Bradac et al. 1988) and it is possible that the presenters may have aimed (consciously or unconsciously) to achieve the same effect.

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To sum, as previously pointed out, speakers in monologue are more likely to adopt a listener perspective than speakers in dialogue as it is generally considered to be a complex and more cognitively costly process that requires special skills (Pickering and Garrod 2004). The lexical profiles of the presentations in the SAP corpus suggest that the presenters seem to have adopted a mix of unmediated and mediated mechanisms of lexical alignment with their audience. The unmediated component (i.e., not influenced by extralinguistic factors) is revealed by the high percentage of repeatedly used high frequency vocabulary, while the mediated one (i.e., influenced by the presenters’ beliefs about specialized knowledge shared with their listeners) is signaled by their repeated use of common terminology, academic, and specialized vocabulary to refer to various notions without additional explanation. In general, mediated alignment, which is commonly motivated by audience assessment and/or social reasons, enhances the likelihood that the content of a speaker’s message would be correctly understood, hence, it increases the likelihood of the interaction being successful (Branigan et al. 2010). The lexical profiles of the presentations imply such awareness on presenters’ part though the study design itself does not allow for any definitive conclusions to be drawn in this regard. In any event, future research should attempt to determine the extent to which presenters actually make conscious decisions about their lexical choices and the reasons that motivate them to align with their listeners as a speech accommodation strategy. At the very least, this line of research will connect the lexical features of the sub-register of student academic presentations with teaching presentational competence to both native and non-native novice presenters in a practically useful way.

Concluding Remarks The chapter focused on examining the lexical profiles of the presentations in the SAP corpus, aiming primarily at determining what the overall lexical composition of successful academic presentations looks like. The analysis tackled three main aspects—i.e. (1) what is lexically “typical” of successful student presentations, (2) the extent to which the lexical composition of presentations contributes to the formal or informal aspect of this oral academic sub-register, and (3) how student presenters’ lexical choices likely facilitate both their own production of speech and its online processing on the part of the audience.

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As expected, some of the lexical categories showed more similarities with written academic prose (in particular, the percentage of high frequency vocabulary, the lexical density of the presentations and the use of academic and other low frequency, technical, and specialized vocabulary) while others brought the presentations closer to certain lexical features associated with informal speech (specifically, the lexical diversity of the presentations and the presence of oral discourse disfluencies). Thus, it can be said that mode of production has a significant but not an overwhelming effect on the lexical composition of presentations. Evidently, other factors such as the influence of the information sources on which the presentational content is based, presenters’ academic level of expertise, perceptions of the formality of the speech event, shared academic and educational background between presenters and listeners, audience assessment, perceived listener-related expectations, level of presentational expertise, quality of the presentations, etc. have played a role in the composition of the presentations’ lexical profiles. Connecting the presentations’ lexical profiles to CAT and psycholinguistic models of interactive alignment was an attempt to interpret what can be considered a typical lexical composition of this text variety through the lens of speech accommodation adjustments presenters possibly consider. The lexical profiles revealed some effects of lexical alignment between presenters and their audience which are both presenter and listener oriented. Most of those effects appear to be not mediated by extralinguistic factors, which is a more cognitively economical way of language processing. However, the presenters’ repeated use of common terminology, academic, and specialized vocabulary is possibly prompted by their prior assessment of the extent to which they shared specialized knowledge with their audience and is, thus, mediated by personal beliefs and social motifs of projecting an expert status at a sufficiently high level of academic competence. Based on the design of this study, however, it is speculative whether this is the case or not, but it will be worthwhile for future research to uncover those effects.

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CHAPTER 4

Collocations in Student Academic Presentations

Abstract  Usage-based research has consistently shown that language use is largely formulaic and a competent use of formulaic language, including collocations, is an important aspect of fluent language production and comprehension. Given that the sub-register of student academic presentations has not been researched from a collocation usage point of view, the focus of this chapter is on student presenters’ use of noun-noun and adjective-­noun collocations in their presentations. Realizing that the prevalence of formulaic expressions (including collocations as a type of formulaic language) is driven by both speaker-related and listener-oriented motivations, the discussion of the findings links the functions of collocations found in student presentations to the benefits they bring for listeners from a communication accommodation perspective. Keywords  Formulaic language • Collocations • Academic presentations • Speech accommodation • Specialized corpus The notion of collocation has been of lexical interest for centuries (see Barnbrook et  al. 2013 for an excellent overview of the historical background of the concept). However, only since late twentieth century has it started to be more systematically researched and recognized as an important aspect of language knowledge and usage. Nonetheless, lexical researchers and lexicographers have been long aware that our lexical © The Author(s) 2020 A. Zareva, Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37980-3_4

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knowledge consists of not only single words “but of their predictable combinations, and of the cultural knowledge which these combinations often encapsulate” (Stubbs 2001, p.  3). Thus, discussions about lexical knowledge, which were previously dominated by interest in the knowledge of single words, started to include discussions of collocational knowledge as a vital component of natural language. Consequently, the Firthian tradition of interest in the semantic properties of collocations was expanded by adding two practical lines of inquiry to it—i.e., on the one hand, how collocations can be reliably described and identified and, on the other, what the relationship is between collocations and the psychological reality of interpretation of meaning (Hoey 2005). In Hoey’s (2005) words, “We can only account for collocation if we assume that every word is mentally primed for collocational use” (p. 8). This chapter focuses on the use of collocations in student academic presentations. Most of the collocational research to date has been carried out on written texts, especially corpus-based studies exploring the academic register. Those studies have added invaluable insights not only to lexicography and linguistic and language learning theory but also to our understanding of the value of collocations in natural language use and the pedagogical implications stemming from it. However, research on spoken academic language, which is an integral part of any educational and scholarly development experience in higher education, has been lagging behind research on written academic prose for a variety of reasons. To my knowledge, the study that will be discussed in this chapter is one of the few studies on collocations in student academic presentations and the only  one that goes further to connect their use to lexical accommodation strategies presenters use to adjust to the situational characteristics of the discourse. This chapter will unfold as follows: First, the notion of collocation will be overviewed with an eye on the way it has been treated by various research traditions. The main purpose of this overview is to highlight the multifaceted and somewhat fluid nature of the notion itself which, as a result, allows it to be approached from different perspectives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Next, I will provide a brief overview of some of the likely roles of collocation usage in student presentations with a focus  on certain functions that are more alighted with presenters’ attempts to accommodate their listeners rather than to just relieve the pressure they experience as speakers. At the heart of this discussion is the understanding that the use of formulaic language in general is “cyclically harvested from and resown into the shared linguistic inventory of the community, as individuals

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both imitate the preferred forms of others and also contribute to the pool of idiomatic material from which others draw. This suggests that the formulaic material plays a central role in maintaining the identity of the community” (Wray 2002, p. 92). Taking a listener perspective in this discussion is also intended to create a bridge between the findings about presenters’ use of collocations and their attempt to facilitate listener comprehension of the complex and oftentimes novel content of their presentations. Following Wray (2002) and Schmitt (2004), I will use the terms formulaic language and formulaic sequences broadly with the understanding that the selected characteristics of these all-encompassing terms discussed later in this chapter also apply to collocations.

The Notion of Collocation: Various Perspectives, Various Research Agendas Generally, collocations can be described as a sub-category of formulaic language which occupies the transitional area between idioms and free combinations (Benson et al. 1986; Laufer and Waldman 2011; Wolter and Gyllstad 2011; Wray 2002). There are a variety of approaches to operationalizing and, respectively, researching and studying collocations which shows that the notion can be interpreted from different perspectives for different purposes. In this section, the concept of collocation will not be discussed in much depth because it has been historically elaborated on in several book-long publications on collocations and formulaic language (e.g., Barfield and Gyllstad 2009; Barnbrook et al. 2013; Schmitt 2004; Wray 2002) and in numerous articles. Instead, I will briefly discuss it from the point of view of the various treatments it has received over time with an emphasis on how it will be used in the study presented later in this chapter. Interestingly, there is still no unanimous agreement on the notion of collocation, and, respectively, various researchers have treated it from somewhat different perspectives (Barfield and Gyllstad 2009; Barnbrook et al. 2013; Zareva and Shehata 2015). The phraseological tradition was historically the tradition that brought to the fore the notion of collocation in linguistic theory during the early twentieth century. Within this tradition, collocation is defined as a combination in which either word can take on a meaning which it does not have in non-collocational environments (e.g., black eye, red tape) or for which there are restrictions on the

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s­ubstitutability of the words forming the collocation (e.g., Howarth 1998a; Nesselhauf 2005). Thus, the criteria used for classifying different types of word combinations within the phraseological tradition include ones that are derived from phraseology such as semantic transparency, degree of substitutability, and degree of productivity. These criteria, consequently, allow for a scalar classification of word expressions, ranging from free combinations to restricted collocations, or pure idioms (Howarth 1998b; Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992). Another approach to defining collocation comes from the so-called “neo-Firthian” tradition which takes a frequency-based tack on it. In this tradition, collocation is defined as co-occurring words within a certain distance of each other, and these expressions are seen as central to the psychological interpretation of meaning. Building upon Firth’s work on collocation, Halliday (1966) convincingly argued that lexical items are able to “predict” their own environment—i.e. other items that they would co-occur with—at a probability greater than chance. He also introduced terms like node (the word form or lemma under investigation), collocate (the co-occurring word form or lemma), and span (a specified distance between the node and its collocates to the left or right of the node) which have become fundamental not only to operationalizing the notion of collocation but also to corpus-based research in general. Sinclair’s (1991) pioneering work made invaluable contribution to our present-day understanding of collocation and the methodology of researching the notion. To mention only a few practical solutions, he determined and proposed that a window of four words to the left and right of a node constitutes its optimal environment of collocational influence (Jones and Sinclair 1974, p.  21). He argued that meaning is produced based on two principles which should be seen as complementing each other—i.e. the open choice principle, where available syntactic slots are filled with minimal structural restrictions, and the idiom principle, according to which “a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments” (Sinclair 1991, p. 110). He further stressed the importance of the idiom principle and its implications for the study of natural language production by emphasizing that “words do not occur at random in a text” (Sinclair 1991, p. 110) and that the idiom principle is the basis for the interpretation of texts—i.e. natural language seems to work mostly on preconstructed phrases of different length. In sum, from a frequency-based perspective, frequent collocations

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are taken to indicate the presence of preconstructed phrases or formulaic sequences which are possibly stored and retrieved from memory as a whole “rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar” (Wray 2002, p.  9). The reasoning behind this assumption is that “the more often a string is needed, the more likely it is to be stored in prefabricated form to save processing effort, and once it is so stored, the more likely it is to be the preferred choice when that message needs to be expressed” (Wray 2002, p. 37). Additionally, given their frequency in natural language, such constructions are hypothesized to be crucial to the naturalness of native speakers’ production (Durrant and Schmitt 2009; Wray 2002). Finally, the statistical tradition of collocation identification, which can be considered an extension of the frequency-based tradition, adds further confirmation to the non-randomness of co-occurrence of some words (Zareva and Shehata 2015, p. 78). Within this tradition, collocation is not only viewed as a frequent co-occurrence of words but also as a statistical association of words (Biber et al. 1999). As Sinclair and Renouf (1988) rightly pointed out, statistical evidence is useful “because it distinguishes the commoner patterns of usage, which occur very frequently indeed, from the less common usage, which occurs very infrequently” (p.151). Clear (1993) further highlighted the importance of statistically based analysis of collocation as a way of providing “a fuller and more satisfying account of the full meaning potential of lexical items” (p. 291). Over the years, several measures of the strength of the association between words have been identified (e.g., t-score, z-score, mutual information [MI] score, discussed in more detail in the section “Collocations in Student Academic Presentations” in this chapter) which generally work on the principle of “comparing the number of times a collocation appears in a corpus with the number of times it would be predicted to appear by chance on the basis of the frequency of its component words” (Durrant and Schmitt 2009, p. 167). To sum up, the presence of a number of research traditions of operationalizing and researching collocation comes to show that the notion can be approached from different perspectives. Even though collocations are regarded as formulaic language, unlike formulaic sequences that can be entirely or partly fixed, collocational pairings are oftentimes not exclusive combinations (Sinclair 1987; Wray 2002) as can be demonstrated by examples such as dropout rate, literacy rate, acceptance rate, speech rate, high rate. Their fluidity, however, allows them to be studied from a

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­ hraseological as well as frequency-based and statistical perspectives for p different purposes (Barfield and Gyllstad 2009; Gablasova et al. 2017). As Barfield and Gyllstad (2009) noted, the various views of collocation illustrate “how different conceptualizations can lead into quite distinct research agendas” (p. 7). In light of this conclusion and the methodology used in the study discussed later in this chapter, I will use the term collocation as defined in the frequency-based and statistical traditions of the notion. That is, collocation is operationalized as a sequence of two words which co-occur more frequently than chance would predict, based on the frequency of occurrence of the individual constituent words. This definition, on the one hand, allows for the identification of word combinations with relatively high frequency which genuinely have a collocational relationship (e.g., academic achievement, language acquisition, average age) versus word pairings which are frequent simply because their constituents are frequent (e.g., such as, as a, both of ). On the other hand, it allows for the identification of two-word combinations of a specific composition in the SAP corpus, which is a specialized and relatively small-sized corpus and determining their collocational status in a much more sizeable corpus of the English language such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies 2008) (the procedure is explained in more detail in the section “Collocations in Student Academic Presentations” in this chapter).

Functions of Formulaic Language and Collocations in Native Speakers’ Language Use The notion of collocation as defined in the frequency-based tradition and their high occurrence in texts in both speech and writing inevitably leads us to the question of their functions in natural language. Research on formulaic language, including collocations, has not only broadened our understanding of lexical knowledge in general, but has also spread to involve a large number of research areas such as first and second language acquisition, language development, language education, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, lexicography, and others. What seems to fuel this increased interest is the realization that formulaic language (e.g., collocations, idioms, phrasal expressions, proverbs, sayings, etc.) is pervasive in natural language (Biber et  al. 1999; Erman and Warren 2000) and an essential aspect of native speakers’ fluent and natural production in speech

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and writing (Ellis et  al. 2008; Pawley and Syder 1983; Schmitt 2013; Sinclair 1991; Wray 2002). By using different procedures and units of analysis, researchers have come up with different estimates of the share of formulaic language in natural language use. For instance, Erman and Warren (2000) suggested that between 52% and 58% of the language they analyzed was formulaic. Howarth (1998a) determined that verb-noun collocations in the academic writing of social sciences occurred at a rate of 38% in his corpus. Thus, this line of research “convincingly shows that formulaic language is no mere peripheral feature of language, but rather is a ubiquitous and essential” (Schmitt 2013, p. 1). Not surprisingly, the explosion of interest in the use of formulaic language in native speakers’ usage has inspired even more interest in second language learning research. Even though collocational studies in ESL research fall outside the scope of this chapter and will not be reviewed here, it should be noted that the importance of the notion of collocation in second language (L2) teaching, learning, and usage has been brought to the fore in the last couple of decades by a good number of studies, learner dictionaries, and pedagogic materials, specifically designed for the teaching of English as a foreign/second language. It has also inspired a great deal of research in learner corpora to find out more about the collocational patterns in language production of L2 learners at various levels of proficiency, their learning and processing patterns of different types of formulaic language, etc. (for more information, see Barfield and Gyllstad 2009; Barnbrook et al. 2013; Schmitt 2004; Wray 2002). When looking at adult NES language production, one of the observations commonly made in the published literature is that their substantial use of formulaic language (including collocations as a type of formulaic language) must be governed by both speaker-related and listener-oriented motivations. It is the latter that more explicitly connects the functions of formulaic language in natural language use to CAT and, in a way, establishes a link between the linguistic and psycholinguistic reality of language use and its sociolinguistic implications. While it is hard to determine whether formulaic language is used primarily to benefit speakers or whether it is mostly motivated by speakers’ choices to ease the processing burden of their listeners, it would be safe to say that it is a mix of both. After all, we, as language users, share and mix roles—i.e. sometimes we assume primarily the role of speakers (e.g., when telling a story or giving a presentation), other times of listeners (e.g., when listening to a story or presentation), or a mix of both (e.g., when having a conversation).

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In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of the functions of formulaic language which are more listener than speaker oriented as these are the functions that can be attributed to presenters’ attempts to facilitate their listeners’ comprehension. The discussion is based on Wray’s (2002) observations of the functions of formulaic language among native speaking adults. Wray (2002) provided one of the most comprehensive and informative overviews of the functions of formulaic language from speaker’s and listener’s point of view that can largely explain its pervasiveness in natural language (see Chapters 4 and 5  in her book). The focus in the current discussion will be on the listener perspective in terms of how presenters’ choices of collocations can be interpreted as being directed toward easing listeners’ processing effort and comprehension. However, as noted earlier, separating the speaker’s from the listener’s perspectives is arbitrary as we are rarely in the role of only one or the other. Rather, we experience language both as speakers and listeners; so, we can safely assume that both roles inform each other. Below are some of the main functions of formulaic language which illustrate various ways student presenters may have attempted to accommodate their audience of peers by using collocations from a wide range of registers. Keeping in mind that these are educated adult language users, we can reasonably expect that they have accumulated rich repertoires of formulaic sequences throughout their lifelong exposure to language in various contexts (e.g., social, academic, disciplinary, professional, etc.). These repertoires possibly include memorized chunks of texts, quotations, lists, slang, subject-specific terms, etc. which come with multiple benefits. From a listener’s perspective: 1. The use of formulaic language saves on processing effort because memorized sequences from a variety of registers do not require additional attention to be decoded fast. For example, collocations like added benefit, definitive answer, gray area, language barrier, regular basis, etc. serve a wide range of contexts. Thus, their use is likely to favor listeners’ easy vs. more effortful processing if the same ideas are expressed in a non-formulaic way. 2. Some of the collocations may signal identity role/s the presenters bring up as shared by the members of the speech community they deliver their presentations to. For example, instances of presenters’ use of discipline-specific terminology without further elaboration (e.g., consonant deletion, back vowel, agglutinating language) can be

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interpreted as speakers’ way of marking their disciplinary affiliation and area of expertise as  part of their shared academic experience with their peers. 3. Related to this is the presenters’ use of collocations referring to certain discipline-specific notions such as communicative competence, early bilingual, error analysis, language acquisition, etc. that are part of a shared formulaic disciplinary repertoire between presenters and listeners. To use Pawley’s (1991) term, these collocations act like “subject matter codes.” They are conventionalized by speech communities and used to specify “what things may be said about a particular subject or topic, how these things are said, idiomatically, and when they are said, appropriately” (p. 339). 4. At the same time, presenters also may try to expand their peers’ formulaic disciplinary repertoires by introducing collocations that refer to novel notions which they consider to be less familiar or unfamiliar to their listeners (e.g., code mixing, tissue abnormality, contrastive analysis, inhibitory control, phonological core, etc.). In those cases, they tend to provide further explanation of the concepts expressed by the collocations or highlight subtle differences in their use in the literature. Such attempts markedly indicate presenters’ ability to anticipate their listeners’ knowledge and prioritize expanding their disciplinary knowledge with novel concepts expressed by specific collocations. 5. Another possible reason for presenters’ use of collocations can be related to their attempts to sustain fluent output to match their listeners’ expectations of the sub-register of academic presentation itself. This function, as we will see later in the study, is supported by the presenters’ use of a mix of collocations that are associated with different registers. In other words, the demands of the genre/sub-­ register are such that they prompt presenters to choose collocations that accommodate both the situational characteristics of the speech event and the informational content of their presentations. 6. Given the oral mode of delivery of the presentations with a relatively small visual and informational support for the audience, the presenters need to provide language-based support to keep their listeners’ comprehension of dense informational content well aligned with the rate of delivery of the presentation itself. One way of facilitating this process is to use collocations which not only trigger listeners’

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­ erception of accuracy, but also can be easily understood. So, the p use of collocations in student presentations would indicate presenters’ sensitivity to the relationship they see between listeners’ processing pressure, stemming from the amount of information to be processed in a limited time, and the language-based support they can provide to ease this pressure. 7. Presenters’ use of collocations from a range of registers would also imply an attempt to maintain their listeners’ expectations of appropriateness to the genre/sub-register of student academic presentations itself. As the analysis of the SAP corpus will demonstrate, some collocations are typical of the less formal registers of conversations, fiction, and magazines, while others are predominantly associated with written academic prose. This somewhat imbalanced mix of collocations drawn from different registers in various proportions suggests that the style of student presentations (at least, in US academic context) is formal in disciplinary content, but mostly informal in some language choices, such as the selection of collocations, used to flesh out that content. 8. Finally, student academic presentations are, more often than not, semi-scripted, rehearsed, or semi-rehearsed speech acts. At one extreme, some students report no use of notes or other supporting language whatsoever when preparing for their delivery. At the opposite extreme, other students report to have fully or partially scripted their presentations by using notes, flash cards, or by directly copying relevant material from their sources in the notes section of their presentation PowerPoint slides. This process of presentation preparation suggests that the connection between presenters’ preparation routines and their use of collocations is largely intentional and aimed at helping not only themselves as speakers organize their thoughts, but also helping their audience in some way. In general, texts which are scripted or semi-scripted and heavy in formulaic language are likely to be constructed in that manner primarily for the listener’s sake (Wray 2002).

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Collocations in Student Academic Presentations The range of functions that collocations may have in student presentations certainly mirrors to a large extent some general functions of formulaic language in natural language use. Given that this sub-register has not been studied in this regard, especially in light of the relationship between presenters’ use of collocations and their attempts to better accommodate their listeners’ online comprehension of complex content, the study discussed in the rest of the chapter will address the following research questions (RQs): 1. Do student presenters use collocations (specifically, noun-noun and adjective-noun constructions) and non-collocations at the same rate in their presentations or do they tend to use one of the categories more than the other? This line of analysis will give us an indication of the extent to which student presenters employed noun-noun and adjective-noun collocations as a listener accommodation strategy. 2. Is there a strong relationship between the frequencies with which the collocations were used in the SAP corpus and COCA? In some sense, the answer to this question would reveal the register/s from which the student presenters primarily drew their collocations. It would also give us a better idea of whether or not the rate of presenters’ collocational usage mirrors the rate of the same language in the larger and broader context of language use which COCA represents. 3. Is there a strong relationship between the frequencies with which the identified collocations were used across the five registers in COCA? Generally, we can reasonably expect that some collocations will be in use across all registers and some will have more limited utility or be predominantly used only in some registers but not in others. So, this line of analysis will aim to determine whether the presenters’ collocations are of more general nature, thus, appropriate to several registers or whether they may be limited to, for instance, the academic one only. The rest of the chapter focuses on collocational analysis of the presentations in the SAP corpus. The notion of a collocation is adopted as viewed from the perspective of the frequency-based tradition. The analysis is limited to directly adjacent pre-modified nouns—i.e. noun phrases in

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which the head noun is pre-modified either by an adjective or another noun. These specific structures were chosen because they were the most common combinations in the SAP corpus (a detailed description of the SAP corpus is presented in Chap. 2), compared to other possible combinations of lexical words. Identification of the Word Combinations The SAP corpus was tagged for part of speech (PoS) which allowed all nounnoun and adjective-noun pairs to be extracted from the presentations using ANTCONC’s (Anthony 2006) concordance feature. The extracted combinations were not lemmatized in order to preserve certain unique selection preferences between words. As Stubbs (1993) pointed out, “meaning is not a constant across the inflected forms of a lemma” and “every sense or meaning of a word has its own grammar: each meaning is associated with a distinct formal patterning” (p.  17). In other words, some individual word forms oftentimes have distinct lexical profiles—for instance, the word English in singular in the term native English and in plural in the term world Englishes refers to different concepts, so conflating the singular and the plural forms will entirely blur the distinctive usage of the terms. Thus, instances such as native English and world Englishes, working class and grammar classes, exclamation point and interesting points were treated as separate combinations. As some corpus researchers (e.g., Barnbrook et al. 2013) have pointed out, PoS tagging helps distinguish between homographs in texts, such as clusters (verb in 3rd person, singular, present tense) and clusters (noun), leading to higher precision in the identification of collocations. Since the SAP corpus was PoS tagged, it allowed for a finely grained identification of the adjective-noun and noun-noun combinations by setting clear inclusion and exclusion criteria in the selection process. The following combinations were not included in the analysis: 1. Pre-modified noun combinations that were part of book or article titles (since they were not produced by the presenters themselves). 2. Noun combinations from quotes (since the study aimed to draw conclusions regarding the performance of the presenters themselves). 3. Proper nouns (e.g., Batia Laufer, Paul Meara). 4. Adjacent nouns that were part of a list rather than noun-noun combination (e.g., education, age, language). 5. Stand-alone acronyms (e.g., L2, ESL).

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6. Nouns pre-modified by determiners, semi-determiners (as listed in Biber et al. 1999), or words other than nouns or adjectives (e.g., last chance, another factor, both speakers, duh factor, two participants, eighth grade). 7. Post-modified noun heads (e.g., language one, mission accomplished, age six, head initial). 8. Nouns pre-modified by a coordinated expression (e.g., half and half spread). 9. Instances where more than one adjective or noun modified the head noun were considered multi-word combinations and were not included in the analysis of two-word collocations (e.g., complicated writing skills, L2 target vocabulary, Universal Grammar language theory, Peabody picture vocabulary test). This procedure resulted in a total of 3052 noun-noun and adjective-­ noun combinations (on a count of  tokens—i.e., including the repeatedly used ones) or 1706 different combinations (on a count of types—i.e., without the repetitions) retrieved from the 100,280-word SAP corpus. On average, each presenter used 61 noun-noun and adjective-noun combinations in their presentations (3052/50 presenters), with the repetitions of those combinations accounting for 44% of the presenters’ usage of those structures. The next step in the analysis was to determine the collocational strength of the extracted word combinations. To do so, following Durrant and Schmitt’s (2009) procedure, two types of frequency-based methods were used. The first method involved tallying the frequency with which each combination occurred in COCA. The second method involved determining the strength of the associations between the words in the noun-noun and adjective-noun expressions that COCA’s interface provides. COCA is one of the largest, freely available corpora of contemporary English which was started in 1990 and to which, each year, about 20 million words are added. At present, it contains over 577  million words of text, approximately equally distributed along five registers—spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and the academic register. The texts are derived from a wide variety of real-life contexts of language use such as unscripted conversations, TV shows, short stories, plays, articles from children’s and popular magazines, newspapers, academic journals, books, etc., which means that the authenticity of language use across a wide variety of situational contexts is well preserved in the corpus. Since COCA is one of the largest and most representative corpora of general contemporary English,

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it is safe to assume that combinations which occur frequently in it are commonly used in the American English variety. The second method involved obtaining an association measure of collocational strength. From a frequency-based perspective, several different measures have been proposed as means of identifying word pairs which can be considered collocations such as the t-score, z-score, mutual information (MI) score, and several others (Barnbrook et al. 2013; Gablasova et al. 2017; and Hunston 2002 provide useful overviews of the most popular measures). By and large, all measures of collocational strength take into account two main observations in their calculation—the “observed” frequency (i.e., the number of times a collocation appears in a corpus) and the “expected” frequency (i.e., the number of times a combination within a particular span would be expected to appear by chance on the basis of the frequency of its constituent words) (Biber et al. 1998; Durrant and Schmitt 2009; Hunston 2002). For the purposes of the current analysis, the MI score was used as a measure of collocational strength because it is known to give prominence to word combinations and technical terms which may not be very frequent in natural language (Barnbrook et  al. 2013; Gablasova et al. 2017); yet, the likelihood of finding their constituent words next to each other is relatively high. For instance, the collocation developmental writing is less frequent in COCA (it occurs 26 times in the corpus) compared to physical world which occurs 623 times in the same corpus. However, the MI score of developmental writing is 5.41 which is higher than the MI score of physical world (MI = 3.56), which suggests that the likelihood of encountering developmental next to writing in natural language is greater than the likelihood of finding physical before world. The example also illustrates a drawback of the MI score pointed out in the corpus literature that, in general, it may overestimate the strength of the association between words especially in instances of low frequencies, which would not support a high degree of confidence in a strong association (Gries 2010). In terms of what MI score values can be interpreted as indicative of a collocation, the literature suggests that an MI score around or below zero would show no relationship between words—i.e. the words occur next to each other by chance (Biber et al. 1998). An MI score of 3 or higher has been proposed to be showing a sufficiently strong association between words in a corpus (Hunston 2002). The present study takes this value as a minimum condition for identifying a collocation (vs. non-collocation).

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Results and Discussion of the Findings In this section, the results of the analyses, addressing each of the research questions stated earlier, will be presented along with an interpretation of the findings. The perspective taken in the interpretation of the results is listener driven, realizing that separating the speaker’s from listener’s perspective is somewhat arbitrary. RQ 1:  Do student presenters use collocations (specifically, noun-noun and adjective-noun constructions) and non-collocations at the same rate in their presentations or do they tend to use one of the categories more than the other? To test the hypothesis of no difference in the frequency with which presenters employed noun-noun and adjective-noun collocations vs. non-­ collocations of the same combinations, a paired sample t-test was conducted. It evaluated the significance of the mean difference of the two types of comparisons (i.e., noun-noun and adjective-noun collocations and non-collocations of the same composition). The results showed that, on average, the presenters used noticeably more collocations (M = 37.98, SD = 8.98) than non-collocations (M = 23.40, SD = 6.85). Respectively, the mean difference between the two categories was significant (M = 14.58, SD = 14.71, t(49) = 7.009, p